Harmonised Unemployment Rates (HURs), OECD | WPN World People News

The OECD unemployment rate was stable at 7.5% in March 2014. Across the OECD area, 45.9 million persons were unemployed, 4.0 million less than the peak in April 2010, but still 11.3 million more than in July 2008.

OECD Harmonised Unemployment Rates, s.a.

The unemployment rate was also stable in the Euro area, at 11.8%, for the fourth consecutive month, 0.2 percentage point lower than one year before.

In other countries, the unemployment rate was stable in March in Japan (at 3.6%) and the United States (at 6.7%) while it declined in Canada (by 0.1 percentage point, to 6.9%), Australia (by 0.3 percentage point, to 5.8%) and Korea (by 0.4 percentage point, to 3.5%), and rose in Mexico (by 0.4 percentage point, to 5.1%). More recent data referring to April 2014 show that the unemployment rate decreased by 0.4 percentage point in the United States (to 6.3%),while it was stable in Canada.

In March, the unemployment rate for women increased by 0.1 percentage point (to 7.7%) while the unemployment rate for men fell by 0.1 percentage point (to 7.4%). Unemployment rates for both groups, however, were below the levels reached one year before, by 0.4 and 0.5 percentage point, respectively. The unemployment rate for youth, at 15.5% in March, was 0.8 percentage point lower than one year before, but still 2.5 percentage points higher than in July 2008. Youth unemployment is 9.1 percentage points higher than the rate for people above 25 years of age (6.4%) and remains exceptionally high in several Euro area countries such as Greece (at 56.8% in January, the latest month available), Spain (at 53.9%), Italy (at 42.7%), Portugal (at 35.4%) and the Slovak Republic (at 32.5%).

Source: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development