Another piece of good news for the eurozone: unemployment is at its lowest, returning to its January 2009 level.
Unemployment, which had reached a record rate of 12.1% in the spring of 2013 compared to 7.5% before the crisis, has been steadily decreasing since September 2016, when it fell below the symbolic threshold of 10%.
Slightly down compared to October and at its lowest in nine years, the rate stood at 8.7% in November, according to Eurostat, the European statistics office.*
For France, Eurostat reports an unemployment rate of 9.2% in November, down from 10.0% in November 2016. Among those under 25, it is estimated at 21.8% in France, compared to 23.8% a year earlier.
For all 19 eurozone countries, the number of unemployed stands at 14.26 million, down from 14.37 million a month earlier. Over the course of a year, it has decreased by 1.56 million people.
This result is not due to chance: after years of stagnation caused by the sovereign debt crisis, the eurozone economy is experiencing its strongest growth in nearly ten years. In the third quarter, it reached an annual growth rate of 2.5%.
But this upturn hides significant disparities. In Germany and Malta, the best performers in the eurozone, the unemployment rate was at 3.6% in November. In Greece, at the opposite end, it stood at 20.5% according to the latest available figures, which date from September. And it remained at 11% in Italy and 16.7% in Spain, although all these figures have decreased over the year.
