Number of unemployed people decreases in July

The number of employed people was 75,000 higher in July 2018 than one year ago, according to Statistics Finland’s Labour Force Survey.

The number of unemployed persons was 183,000, which was 24,000 lower than one year ago. The trend of the unemployment rate was 7.3 percent and the trend of the employment rate was 71.9 percent.

Unemployment and employment vary quite considerably by month and the change from the observation of the previous month mainly describes the seasonal aspect rather than the trend in development.

In July 2018, the number of employed persons was 2,631,000 (margin of error ±33,000), which was 75,000 more than a year earlier. There were 21,000 more employed men and 54,000 more employed women than in July 2017.

The employment rate , that is, the proportion of the employed among persons aged 15 to 64, stood at 74.1 per cent, having been 72.0 per cent one year earlier.

From July 2017, men’s employment rate rose by 0.8 percentage points to 75.4 per cent and women’s by 3.4 percentage points to 72.8 per cent. Adjusted for seasonal and random variation, the trend of the employment rate was 71.9 per cent.

At 6.5 per cent, the unemployment rate was 1.0 percentage points lower in July than one year earlier. The unemployment rate of men decreased by 0.9 percentage points to 6.5 per cent, and that of women by 1.2 percentage points to 6.5 per cent as well from the year before. The trend of the unemployment rate was 7.3 per cent.

In July, there were a total of 618,000 young people aged 15 to 24 . Of them, 353,000 were employed and 37,000 unemployed. The number of young people in the active population, i.e. the employed and unemployed in total, was 390,000. In July, the unemployment rate for young people aged 15 to 24, that is, the proportion of the unemployed among the labour force, stood at 9.4 per cent, which was 2.2 percentage points lower than one year previously.

The trend of the unemployment rate among young people was 16.2 per cent. The share of unemployed young people aged 15 to 24 among the population in the same age group was 6.0 per cent.

There were 1,309 000 persons in the inactive population in July 2018, which was 43,000 fewer than one year earlier. Of the inactive population, 119,000 persons were in disguised unemployment , which was 13,000 fewer than in July 2017.