Government releases on Friday the registered unemployed for October, the last of the publication of monthly figures, as quarterly figures will start to be published instead …
The government publishes on Friday the number of unemployed registered in late October on the lists of the Pole Emploi, one of the last editions of the monthly publication of the mass unemployment figures.
The countdown begins. After the October figures – published this Friday at 6pm – between November and December, the publication of figures of the pole emploi will become quarterly from 2018. The indicator, which has been much discussed each month, aroused strong reservations economists and statisticians on its credibility.
Starting next year, the Dares, Statistics Department of the Ministry of Labor will publish every three months, the average number of job seekers in the quarter. The number of job seekers registered at month end will continue to be posted on the ministry’s website, but no longer will be the subject of a publication.
The new version aims to “focus more on the trend change rather than month by month,” says Dares, which “considers that monthly changes are not significant, and do not have much sense.”
Illustration: since the beginning of the year, the number of unemployed in Class A (without activity) played yo-yo – four five increases and decreases – making it difficult to interpret the figures. If the publication had been based on quarterly averages, reading would have been easier, with three quarters the upside, indicative of a trend.
The indicator had also experienced strong fluctuations in 2016 – five increases and seven decreases – while a quarterly publication have highlighted four quarters of decline.
Since his appointment in May, the Minister of Labor, Muriel Pénicaud had foreshadowed this development by refusing, unlike his predecessors, to respond to monthly figures, saying they “did not reflect well the evolution of the labor market” .
Improvement in “two years”
Until 2018, the next three publications, beginning with the October Friday, will treat these monthly figures so maligned.
In late September, the number of unemployed registered at the employment center were sharply (-1.8%) to $ 3.48 million in France and 3.73 million in all France . But the thinning did little more than make two consecutive increases in July and August.
The other thermometer unemployment rate measured by INSEE has meanwhile increased by 0.2 points in Q3. The discrepancy with the employment center of figures is due to the fact that both indicators do not measure unemployment in the same way: INSEE carries out a survey of 110,000 people, while the employment center publishes the number of individuals on its lists .
According to the National Statistics Institute, 9.4% of the workforce is unemployed in France, 9.7% in France as a whole.
The Government wishes, in accordance with a campaign promise of Emmanuel Macron, to reduce unemployment to 7 percent by 2022.
The President assured that by mid-October that “the fullness of the reforms” and their impact on unemployment would be visible “in a year and a half, to two years.” His economy minister, Bruno Le Maire, has slightly extended the deadline newly building on an “improvement in depth of employment” by “at least two years.”
The government is counting on the effects of the reform of the Labor Code, effective the end of September, and future reforms of unemployment insurance and vocational training.
According to Muriel Pénicaud, “if all the structural measures we are taking are fully effective, we think it is reasonable to consider that unemployment will fall to 7%.”
The immediate addition growth forecast to 1.8% for 2017, indicators on the business environment and private sector activity published this week have continued to improve in November, theoretically enabling environment for ’employment.
