Harmonised Unemployment Rates (HURs), OECD - Updated: October 2019 | WPN World People News

The OECD unemployment rate declined by 0.1 percentage point, to 5.1% in August 2019, the lowest level since data are available for the OECD area (April 1998). Among the OECD area, 32.9 million people were unemployed.

Source: Labour Force Statistics‌‌

In the euro area, the unemployment rate declined by 0.1 percentage point in August, to 7.4%, the same level as in April 2008, just before the financial crisis. The largest declines were observed in Italy (down 0.3 percentage point, to 9.5%) and Portugal (down 0.2 percentage point, to 6.2%).

Outside Europe, the unemployment rate was stable in Canada (at 5.7%), Japan (2.2%), Mexico (3.5%) and the United States (3.7%) and fell by 0.9 percentage point in Korea (to 3.1%). More recent data show that the unemployment rate declined by 0.2 percentage point in the United States in September, to 3.5%, the lowest level since December 1969.

In August, the unemployment rate for youth (people aged 15 to 24) was stable at 11.2% in the OECD area. The youth unemployment rate decreased by 0.2 percentage point in the euro area, to 15.4%, with falls of more than 1.0 percentage point in Italy, Latvia and Portugal. However, it remained above 25% in Greece (in the second quarter of 2019), Italy and Spain.

The OECD unemployment rate for women declined by 0.1 percentage point (to 5.2%), slightly above the unemployment rate for men (stable at 5.1%).

Source: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development