OECD Area Unemployment Rate Down to 6.2% in July 2021

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in September 2021 published its July 2021 unemployment data.

The OECD area unemployment rate fell to 6.2% in July 2021 (41.1 million workers) from 6.4% in June (minus 1.6 million), and still 0.9 percentage point above the rate observed in February 2020. The latest rate largely reflects the return of temporary laid-off workers in the United States and Canada, where they are recorded as unemployed.

In the euro area, the unemployment rate declined to 7.6% in July 2021 from 7.8% in June.

Outside Europe, decreases of 0.3 percentage point or more were registered in July 2021 in Australia (to 4.6%), Canada (to 7.5%), Colombia (to 13.7%), Korea (to 3.3%) and the United States (to 5.4%). The unemployment rate showed little change in Israel (5.0%), Japan (2.8%) and Mexico (4.2%). The unemployment rate further decreased in August 2021 in the United States to 5.2%.

The interactive OECD Data Portal ^[1] allows further exploration of the data (including breakdowns by gender and age), and the full press release can be downloaded here ^[2].