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OECD employment rate at 65.1% in fourth quarter of 2012, 1.4 percentage points below its pre-crisis level

Download the entire news release - (PDF 230KB)  16/04/2013 - The OECD area employment rate – defined as the share of people of working-age who are employed – was 65.1% in the fourth quarter of 2012, 0.1 percentage point higher than in the previous quarter and 0.2 percentage points higher than one year ago. This was still 1.4 percentage points below its pre-crisis level (as observed in the second quarter of 2008).

There are significant divergences in the evolution of the employment rate across OECD countries. Over the course of 2012, the employment rate rose in the United States (by 0.5 percentage points to 67.3%), in Canada (by 0.6 percentage points to 72.5%) and in Japan (by 0.3 percentage points to 70.9%). In contrast, the Euro area employment rate, at 63.6%, ended the year 0.5 percentage point lower than one year ago, with the rate falling by 0.2 percentage point in the fourth quarter compared to the previous quarter. In the Euro area, the largest falls in the employment rate over the quarter were recorded in Estonia, Portugal, the Slovak republic andSpain (down 0.5, 1.4, 0.6 and 0.5 percentage points, respectively).