France: Encouraging signs from the labour market – ING

By FXStreet Julien Manceaux, Senior Economist at ING, notes that the unemployed population continued to decrease in France in April, adding to signs that the labour market is slowly recovering.

Key Quotes

“A rebound of hiring intentions in May in the service sector confidence survey showed this week that the trend may continue, although it is still heavily dependent on government support.

Yesterday, figures published by INSEE showed that the much expected downward trend in French unemployment is continuing for the time being. The unemployed population reached 3.51 million in April, down from 3.58 million in December 2015. The first quarter saw a significant 50k drop in the unemployed population, after a total increase of 90k in 2015. It continued in April, with a drop of almost 20k.

Unfortunately, it did not prove sufficient to bring the official unemployment rate down, which remained at 10.2%. Still, there is a slight improvement as this rate is the lowest since the beginning of 2014, but it falls short of expectations and shows that there is still a long way to go for the French recovery to materialise into much better job data.

Recent confidence survey results by INSEE showed encouraging signs for employment in some …read more

Source:: FX Street