According to Eurostat, the European statistics office, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in the European Union was 6.2 percent in April, the same as in March. The Czech Republic continues to have the lowest unemployment rate, although it rose by a tenth of a percentage point to 2.4 percent. No other EU country has an unemployment rate below three percent.
The unemployment rate also remained unchanged in the euro area at 6.8 percent. Unemployment remains highest in Spain, where it fell from March to 13.3 percent, and in Greece, it rose to 12.7 percent.
This April, the labor market situation was much more favorable than a year ago. In April last year, the unemployment rate was 7.5 percent in the EU and 8.2 percent in the euro countries. At that time, the economy was struggling with the impact of the closures related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eurostat estimates that 13.26 million people were unemployed across the EU in April, including 11.18 million in the euro area. Compared to April last year, the number of unemployed in the EU fell by 2.54 million and 2.18 million in the euro area.
Unemployment among young people under 25 also continued to fall; both compared to March this year and year-on-year. There were 2.60 million in the EU and 2.12 million in the euro area this April. The unemployment rate among young people in both the EU and the euro area was 13.9 percent.
Eurostat bases its calculations on the widely used standard International Labour Organisation (ILO) definition of unemployment. This counts among the unemployed those who have actively looked for work in the last four weeks and can start work in the next two weeks.
In the case of the Czech Republic, Eurostat uses data from the Czech Statistical Office (CSO), which differs from those of the Czech Labour Office, which shows that the unemployment rate in the Czech Republic fell by a tenth of a percentage point to 3.3 percent in April. The CSO bases the unemployment rate on the labor force sample survey, while the Labour Office uses the number of registered job seekers.