The French economy gained nearly 80,000 additional jobs during the first three months of 2022, despite Covid and the start of the war in Ukraine, according to INSEE.
Despite a deteriorating economic context, due to the ongoing Covid epidemic and the outbreak of war in Ukraine, salaried employment continued to rise in the first quarter, primarily driven by the non-temporary market services sector. Between the end of December 2021 and the end of March 2022, it increased by 0.3%, representing 78,700 additional jobs, according to statistics published by INSEE this Thursday morning, which confirm the previous provisional estimate from a month ago.
The increase at the beginning of 2022 mainly comes from the private sector, which recorded a rise of 0.3% (or +69,500 jobs), following a 0.8% increase (+167,200 jobs) in the previous quarter. Public sector employment rose again, albeit modestly, by +0.2% (or +9,200 jobs) after a slight decrease of 0.1% (-8,000 jobs) in the previous quarter.
In total, in the first quarter of 2022, salaried employment is 2.9% higher (or +750,500 jobs) than its level a year earlier. Nearly one-fifth of this increase is explained by the dynamism of work-study contracts, particularly in apprenticeships, according to INSEE. The dynamism has been such since the 2018 reform that it led to a significant statistical revision, with the institute accounting for 240,000 additional jobs from the end of 2019 to the end of 2021.
