These are likely to show that the unemployment rate is stuck at 7.8 per cent, with around 2.5m people officially out of work. This will remind us that it could take a long time for the jobless rate to fall to the 7 per cent threshold that Bank of England governor Mark Carney says is needed before rates rise.
Stable unemployment does not, however, mean there's no jobs growth. There is. Instead, what's happened recently is that the labour force has grown as jobs have grown, thanks to retired folk taking work (perhaps in response to the low incomes caused by low interest rates) and people on welfare being 'incentivised' to seek work.
This large supply of labour is helping to depress wages. Wednesday's figures will show that annual wage inflation is under 2 per cent, implying that wages are falling in real terms.
Usually, such low wage growth would be consistent with ultra-low inflation. One reason this hasn't been the case recently is that productivity has fallen, so that low wage growth still gives us quite high unit wage cost growth. But this might be changing. Wednesday's numbers could also show that total hours worked in the last three months have risen less than GDP (by around 0.3 per cent against 0.7 per cent). This means productivity is picking up, which means unit wage costs could fall.
This in turn implies that inflation will fall, unless either profit margins rise or other costs, such as imported ones, increase. Friday's numbers, however, will suggest there's little sign of the latter. They're likely to show that US producer prices have risen only 1.7 per cent in the last 12 months, and by 1.2 per cent excluding food and energy. This implies there's little sign of global inflation. Those who feared that quantitative easing would raise US inflation have, so far, been proved wrong.
This mix of high unemployment and low inflation points to interest rates staying low.
Other figures, though, will tells us that developed economies are growing slowly. Although official figures on Thursday might show a small fall in eurozone industrial production in July, this will follow some nice rises. The three month-on-three month growth rate should be reasonable, at around 0.8 per cent. And on Friday, we should see a small rise in US retail sales in August, consistent with the economy growing steadily in the third quarter, by around 2 per cent annualised.
