OECD unemployment rate stable at 5.8% in July 2017 | WPN World People News

The OECD unemployment rate was stable at 5.8% in July 2017, unchanged for the second consecutive month. Across the OECD area, 36.2 million people were unemployed, 3.6 million more than in April 2008.

The unemployment rate was also stable in the euro area, at 9.1% in July, with the largest declines observed in Latvia (down 0.4 percentage point, to 8.5%) and the Slovak Republic (down 0.3 percentage point, to 7.3%). By contrast, the unemployment rate increased by 0.2 percentage point, to 9.8%, in France and by 0.1 percentage point in a number of other euro area countries (Austria, Finland, Ireland, Italy and Luxembourg).

The unemployment rate decreased by 0.2 percentage point in July in Canada (to 6.3%), Israel (to 4.1%) and Korea (to 3.6%), and by 0.1 percentage point in Mexico (to 3.2%) and the United States (to 4.3%), while it was stable in Japan, at 2.8%. More recent data show that in the United States the unemployment rate increased by 0.1 percentage point to 4.4% in August while it continued to decrease in Canada (by 0.1 percentage point, to 6.2%).

The OECD unemployment rate for women (down 0.1 percentage point, to 5.9%) was slightly higher than that for men (stable at 5.7%) in July. The OECD unemployment rate for youth (people aged 15 to 24) fell slightly (by 0.1 percentage point, to 11.9%), with larger declines in Latvia (down 2.5 percentage points to 12.6%), the Slovak Republic (down 0.9 percentage point, to 16.6%), Canada (down 0.9 percentage point, to 11.1%) and Korea (down 0.9 percentage point, to 9.4%). The youth unemployment rate remained above 30% in Greece (at 44.4% in May, the latest month available), Spain (at 38.6%) and Italy (at 35.5%).

Source: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development