Eurozone unemployment dips to lowest since November 2008 in July
The rate of euro area unemployment was unchanged at its lowest level since November 2008 last month, thanks in part to an unexpected large fall in the official tally for jobless in Italy.
In seasonally-adjusted terms, in July the proportion of people without a job was at 8.2%, unchanged from the downwardly revised estimate for the prior month, Eurostat said.
Eurozone unemployment for June had originally been pegged at 8.3%.
In July 2017 unemployment stood at 9.1%. In absolute terms meanwhile, the number of men and women out of a job in the single currency bloc decreased by 73,000 versus June to reach 13.381m and by 1.368m when compared to the same month one year earlier.
The countries registering the highest official rates of unemployment in the European Union in July remained Greece (19.5%), Spain (15.1%), Italy (10.4%) and France (9.2%).
Earlier on Friday, ISTAT had reported a surprise fall in Italian unemployment from 10.8% in June to 10.4% for last month (consensus: 10.8%).
On the other end of the spectrum, unemployment was lowest in the Czech Republic (2.3%), Germany (3.4%) and Poland (3.5%).
To take note of, at 6.8% unemployment in the EU's 28 constituent countries was just above the lows plumbed during the first quarter of 2008, just as the Great Financial Crisis was beginning to gather momentum.
In June, EU unemployment was at 6.9%.
Italy's official rate of unemployment was the best behaved from among the euro area's main economies last month, falling by four tenths of a percentage point month-on-month to 10.4%.
Following the release of the jobs data, Jack Allen at Capital Economics told clients: "the relationship between unemployment and wages seems to have weakened over time. But we doubt that the link has broken down altogether, so we expect continued declines in unemployment over the coming years to feed through to somewhat faster pay growth.
"The upshot is that today's data do little to alter the outlook for policy, with the ECB set to tread very carefully over the next few years."