Finland Times

According to the Statistics Finland, the unemployment rate was 9.2 percent in December, 2015.

The number of unemployed persons in December 2016 was 207,000, which was 34,000 lower than one year ago. 

The unemployment rate in the fourth quarter (October to December) was 8.0 per cent, which was 0.7 percentage points lower than in the respective quarter of 2015. 

In 2016, the unemployment rate was on average 8.8 per cent, having been 9.4 per cent in 2015.

In December 2016, the number of employed persons was 2,421,000 (margin of error ±33,000), which was 34,000 more than a year earlier. There were 31,000 more employed men and 3,000 more employed women than in December 2015.

In December 2016, the employment rate, that is, the proportion of the employed among per-sons aged 15 to 64, stood at 68.3 per cent, having been 66.9 per cent one year earlier. From last year’s December, men’s employment rate rose by 2.0 percentage points to 69.7 per cent and women’s by 0.6 percentage points to 66.8 per cent. Adjusted for seasonal and random varia-tion, the trend of the employment rate was 69.0 per cent.

According to Statistics Finland's Labour Force Survey, there were 207,000 unemployed in December 2016 (margin of error ±18,000), i.e. 34,000 fewer than one year earlier. The number of unemployed men was 113,000 and that of women 94,000.

At 7.9 per cent, the unemployment rate was 1.3 percentage points lower in December than one year earlier. Men’s unemployment rate was 8.2 per cent and women’s 7.5 per cent. The trend of the unemployment rate was 8.6 per cent.

In December, there were a total of 634,000 young people aged 15 to 24 . Of them, 248,000 were employed and 43,000 unemployed. The number of young people in the active population, i.e. the employed and unemployed in total, was 291,000. In December, the unemployment rate for young people aged 15 to 24, that is, the proportion of the unemployed among the labour force, stood at 14.7 per cent, which was 4.6 percentage points lower than one year previously. The trend of the unemployment rate among young people was 19.2 per cent. The share of un-employed young people aged 15 to 24 among the population in the same age group was 6.7 per cent.

There were 1,481,000 persons in the inactive population in December 2016, which was the same as one year earlier.