Employment still isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels, but the unemployment rate is continuing to fall, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
The OECD reported that the jobless rate for the OECD area declined to 5.8% in September from 6.0% in the previous month.
The number of jobless workers also dropped by 1.1 million to 38.7 million, it said.
Despite the continued improvement, the unemployment rate for the OECD remained 0.5 percentage points above its pre-pandemic level, and the number of people out of work was 3.3 million higher, the group noted.
In September, the unemployment rate declined in Europe, the U.S. and Canada, the OECD said, and more recent data from Canada and the U.S. show jobless rates continued declining in October too.
Still, the OECD said the jobless rates in Canada and the U.S. remained more than 1.0 percentage points above their pre-pandemic marks.
“Furthermore, the unemployment rate may conceal additional slack in the labour market due to the pandemic as some non-employed people may be ‘out of the labour force’, either because they are not able to actively look for work or are not available to work,” it said.