OECD employment rate increases in the third quarter 2015
The OECD area employment rate – defined as the share of people of working-age who are in employment – increased by 0.1 percentage point, to 66.2% in the third quarter of 2015. It is 0.5 percentage point higher than one year before but 0.3 percentage point below its level in the second quarter of 2008.
The employment rate increased in two-thirds of countries in the third quarter of 2015.
The Euro Area employment rate grew by 0.3 percentage point (to 64.6 %), the eighth straight quarter of growth, and is now up 1.2 percentage points from the trough reached in the first quarter of 2013. Outside the euro area, the employment rate increased by 0.3 percentage point in Turkey (to 50.3 %) and Korea (to 65.8 %), by 0.2 percentage point in the United Kingdom (to 72.7 %) and Japan (73.4 %, the 14th consecutive quarter of increase) and by 0.1 percentage point in Mexico (to 60.6 %). It was stable in the United States (at 68.7 %) and decreased by 0.1 percentage point in Canada (to 72.5 %).
In the third quarter of 2015, the largest increases in employment rates were observed in Estonia (up 2 percentage points, to 73.7 %), Belgium (up 0.6 percentage point, to 62.0 %) and Hungary (up 0.6 percentage point, to 64.3 %, 9.7 percentage points higher than its crisis low).
Compared with the third quarter of 2014, the OECD area employment rate rose for all age groups: by 0.6 percentage point for youth (aged 15-24), by 0.5 percentage point for prime-age workers (aged 25-54) and by 0.7 percentage point for older workers (aged 55-64). Over the same period, labour force participation rate fell by 0.1 percentage point among youth (to 46.6 %), was stable for prime-age people (at 81.5 %) and increased by 0.6 point among older people (to 61.2 %).