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.
Read moreA 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.
Read moreLabour 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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Marginal fall in OECD unemployment rate in March 2021, to 6.5%, 1.2 percentage points above its pre-pandemic level |
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10 May 2021 – The OECD area unemployment rate continued to decline slightly in March 2021, to 6.5% (from 6.6% in February 2021). It remained 1.2 percentage points above the rate observed in February 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the labour market. In March, a marginal decline of the unemployment rate was also observed in the euro area, (to 8.1%, from 8.2% in February 2021), where the largest falls (0.2 percentage point or more) were registered in Finland (to 7.7%), Lithuania (to 8.9%), Portugal (to 6.5%) and Spain (to 15.3%).
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Behind the numbers
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Further statistics on the labour market |
Related labour topics |