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

The OECD unemployment rate was stable at 5.8% in August 2017, unchanged since May. Across the OECD area, 36.1 million people were unemployed, 3.5 million more than in April 2008.

The unemployment rate remained stable in the euro area in August, at 9.1% for the third consecutive month. The largest declines in the area were observed in Latvia (down 0.3 percentage point, to 8.2%) and the Slovak Republic (down 0.2 percentage point, to 7.5%), while the largest increase was recorded in Austria (up 0.2 percentage point, to 5.6%).

The unemployment rate decreased by 0.1 percentage point in Canada (to 6.2%, the third consecutive monthly decline), while it increased by 0.2 percentage point in Korea (to 3.8%), and by 0.1 percentage point in Mexico (to 3.3%) and the United States (to 4.4%). It remained stable in Japan, at 2.8%. More recent data for the United States indicate that the unemployment rate decreased by 0.2 percentage point, to 4.2% in September, while it was stable in Canada.

The OECD unemployment rate was stable for both women and men and across age-groups in August. Although the youth (people aged 15 to 24) unemployment rate remains at twice the overall unemployment rate, it has decreased more rapidly since the peak in January 2013 (down 4.6 percentage points, to 11.6%, for young women and 5.2 percentage points, to 12.1%, for young men) than for people aged 25 and above (whose unemployment rate declined by 1.9 percentage points for women, to 5.2% and by 2.1 percentage points for men, to 4.8%).

Source: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development