“Excellent news” and a figure “at the lowest for almost 15 years”. Elisabeth Borne welcomed this Friday the sharp drop in the unemployment rate, which fell to 7.4% in the fourth quarter of 2021. more serious than we have known in recent decades”, declared the Minister of Labor on France Inter, also pointing to a youth unemployment rate at its lowest “for almost 40 years”.
The figures published Friday by INSEE note a drop in the unemployment rate of 0.6 points compared to the previous quarter, to 7.4% of the working population in France (excluding Mayotte). The Institute points out that the rate “is 0.8 points lower than its pre-crisis level (end of 2019) and its lowest level since 2008, if we exclude the one-off drop in “trompe-l’ eye” of spring 2020, linked to the health crisis “when many people had stopped looking for work.
A government effort against youth unemployment
Over the quarter, the youth unemployment rate fell sharply (-3.6 points) and reached 15.9%, thus reaching “the lowest levels of previous cycles at the end of the 80s and 90s”, adds INSEE. .
Elisabeth Borne recalled that the government had launched the “one young person, one solution” plan in the summer of 2020, bearing in mind that during the 2008-2009 crisis, the youth unemployment rate had “exploded”, increasing by ” 30 % “. “There, we are almost five points lower than before the crisis,” she insisted. While the Court of Auditors estimated this week in its annual report that the success of the “one young person, one solution” plan was to be “put into perspective”, it estimated that “the figures speak for themselves”.