Content
Published:
This is an archived release.
Stable employment and unemployment
The unemployment rate was 3.0 per cent of the labour force in June. The decrease from 3.2 per cent in March is within the error margin.
Adjusted for seasonal variations, the Labour Force Survey (LFS) shows that the unemployment figure fell by 5 000 from March (as measured by the average of the three months from February to April) to June (as measured by the average of the three months from May to July). This is just within the error margin of the LFS, which is between 5 000 and 6 000. The decrease was among people aged over 24 years.
For the same period, seasonally-adjusted figures for those registered unemployed with the Labour and Welfare Organisation (NAV) showed an increase of 6 000, and including people on government initiatives to promote employment the increase was 8 000.
The Labour and Welfare Organisation (NAV) shows a certain increase throughout 2009 compared to the more stable figures from the LFS, which could, besides random sample errors, be a result of the LFS not adequately intercepting the increase in unemployment among new groups of immigrants. This is in comparison to the situation in 2008 where both LFS and NAV showed a clear increase in the unemployment rate. However, the LFS also shows a lower growth than NAV for this period.
NAV reports that 4 700 persons were incorrectly registered unemployed in February 2010. The erroneous figure was lower in previous months, but dates back to October 2008.This has no consequence for the LFS-numbers published by Statistics Norway, only for the comparisons with NAV's figures. Read more on NAV's website, or contact stein.langeland@nav.no |
Unemployment up in other countries
From March to June, unemployment continued to rise in the EU countries as well as in the USA. In both Sweden and Denmark the unemployment rate increased by one percentage point to 9.0 and 6.2 per cent respectively. In the USA it rose from 8.5 to 9.5 per cent in the same period. All figures refer to seasonally-adjusted data from Eurostat .
Stable employment
Employment increased by 5 000 from March (as measured by the average of the three months from February to April) to June (as measured by the average of the three months from May to July), which is within the error margin in the LFS. When taking the error margin into account, employment has remained stable since May 2008. Even though the employment rates have remained stable there has been movement within the employment, but the increase in employment within the public sector has contributed to a reduction in some of the effect of a decrease in certain industries within the private sector, such as construction and parts of the manufacturing industry.
Employment and unemployment figures include permanent residentsThe LFS only includes persons who are registered as residents in the population register. Persons working in Norway who are not registered as permanent residents or who are planning to stay for less than six months are not included in the employment figure in the LFS. If these people lose their job it does not count as a fall in employment or a rise in unemployment. In national accounts figures (NR), employed non-residents are included in the employment figure as long as they work in an establishment in Norway. If employment decreases in this group it will count as a fall in employment in NR. Statistics Norway publishes separate figures for all registered non-residents once a year. See short-term immigrants . |
Uncertain figuresThe purpose of making seasonal adjustments is to describe the development over the last year, corrected for seasonal variations. In order to reduce uncertainty, the published series are three-month moving averages of the seasonally-adjusted figures. However, uncertainty means that sampling errors must be considered when interpreting the figures from the LFS. We normally compare the latest non-overlapping three-month periods. An overview of sampling errors in the LFS can be found in “ About the statistics ”, chapter 5 section 3. Quarterly LFS figures, not seasonally adjusted, are presented in a separate article . |
RevisionsThe complete time series is re-estimated each month, and this may cause some adjustments of previously published figures. See Revisions for more information . |
Tables:
The statistics is published with Labour force survey.
Contact
-
Arbeidsmarked og lønn
E-mail: arbeidsmarked@ssb.no
-
Erik Herstad Horgen
E-mail: erik.horgen@ssb.no
tel.: (+47) 93 08 68 62