Employment Outlook 2009 Country Notes: Italy
Preliminary estimates for the second quarter in Italy suggest a significant further increase. However, the unemployment rate could have risen even further if a number of workers had not stepped back from the labour market (the participation rate has, in fact, fallen by 0.4 percentage points in one year, especially in the southern part of the country). As a result the percentage of working age population with a job, which was already the third lowest among OECD countries after Turkey and Hungary, slumped by 0.9 percentage points and it is now at 57.4%.
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