The Minister of Labor, Elisabeth Borne, described this figure as “excellent news” on Friday, “at the lowest for almost 15 years”. “No one imagined that we could have such results coming out of one of the most serious economic crises we have known in recent decades,” she added, also pointing to an unemployment rate for young people at their lowest “for almost 40 years”.
Over the previous four quarters, the unemployment rate had remained almost stable, between 8.1% and 8%, recalls INSEE, which revised the third quarter unemployment rate downwards by 0.1 point to 8%. “It is 0.8 points lower than its pre-crisis level (end of 2019) and its lowest level since 2008, if we exclude the one-off fall in the spring of 2020, linked to the health crisis ”when many people had stopped looking for work, underlines INSEE.
Drop in youth unemployment
Over the quarter, the youth unemployment rate fell sharply (-3.6 points) and reached 15.9%, thus reaching “the lowest levels of the previous cycles at the end of the 80s and 90s”. It fell by 0.3 points for those aged 25-49, to 6.8%, and remained stable for those aged 50 or over, at 5.8%. Élisabeth Borne recalled that the government had launched the “one young person, one solution” plan in the summer of 2020, bearing in mind that during the 2008-2009 crisis, the youth unemployment rate had “exploded”, increasing by “30 %”. “There, we are almost five points lower than before the crisis,” she insisted.
While the Court of Auditors estimated this week in its annual report that the success of the “one young person, one solution” plan was to be “put into perspective”, it estimated that “the figures speak for themselves”. The drop is more marked for women (-0.8 point to 7.3%) than for men (-0.4 point to 7.5%), whereas the difference was in the opposite direction in the previous quarter.