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The International Labour Organisation (ILO) considers people of working age to be in one (and one only) of three situations in the labour market: employed, unemployed, or inactive. The employed and unemployed together are known as the labour force.
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A closely watched indicator is the unemployment rate (the number of unemployed as a percentage of the labour force). The unemployment rate tracks what economists call “labour slack” – the match between the jobs on offer in an economy and the number of people seeking to work – and is a key indicator of a society’s economic and social well-being.
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Labour force data are typically analysed by gender, age group (youth, prime age, older). They are also frequently broken down in many other ways for specific policy purposes: by economic sector, by occupation, by level of education, full- and part-time workers, the short- and long-term unemployed.
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OECD unemployment rate drops slightly to 8.0% in March 2013 |
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OECD Harmonised Unemployment Rates, s.a.
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15/05/2013 - The OECD unemployment rate decreased to 8.0% in March 2013, compared with 8.1% in the previous month. However, this small decline masks diverging patterns across countries. In the euro area, the unemployment rate hit a new record high - up 0.1 percentage point to 12.1% in March. The unemployment rate also rose by 0.2 percentage point in Canada (to 7.2%). By contrast, it fell by 0.1 percentage point in the United States (to 7.6%), by 0.2 percentage point in Japan (to 4.1%) and by 0.3 percentage point in Korea (to 3.2%). More recent data referring to the month of April show that the unemployment rate continued to fall in the United States (by 0.1 percentage points to 7.5%) while it was stable in Canada.
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Behind the numbers |
Further statistics on the labour market
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Related labour topics |
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