The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says unemployment rate in the OECD area edged lower in Feburary.
The Paris-based OECD said Thursday that the unemployment rate decreased to 8.0% in February, down from 8.1% in the previous month.
The United States led the way with a 0.2 percentage point decline to 7.7%, while the rate was stable in Canada (at 7.0%). The unemployment rate was also stable in the euro area in February (at 12.0%), but it ticked up in Japan.
More recent data for March shows that the unemployment rate continued to fall in the U.S., down by another 0.1 percentage points, but it rose in Canada (by 0.2 percentage points to 7.2%).
The OECD says that trends in unemployment rates across OECD countries have diverged significantly since the beginning of the economic and financial crisis. It reports that unemployment rates are now significantly below the peaks they reached in the second half of 2009 in both Canada and the U.S. And in Japan, rates are close to their pre-crisis level, while they are significantly below that level in Germany. Yet, unemployment rates reached new peaks in February in several European countries, it notes, including France and Spain.
Overall, there were 48.7 million people unemployed in the OECD area in February, down by 0.2 million from January, but 13.9 million more than in July 2008, it reports.