France will overhaul its treatment of unemployment data and will no longer report a monthly jobless rate following recommendations from an official report, statistics office INSEE said on Monday.
Instead of its monthly report, which includes a jobless rate calculated in line with International Labour Organisation statistics, INSEE will provide a quarterly report and will adjust its methods to bring them closer to European partners. The change follows controversy over the method of calculating French unemployment figures after discrepancies emerged between calculations made by INSEE and the National Employment Agency ANPE.
The ILO unemployment rate reported by INSEE has also been lower than the equivalent figure calculated by European Union statistics body Eurostat over the last few months. The controversy has fed criticism of claims by the government that unemployment has been declining steadily under successive centre-right administrations over the past two years.
According to the government inspectors who wrote the report presented to Economy Minister Christine Lagarde on Monday, changes in the treatment of employment statistics led to "overestimating the fall in ILO unemployment in 2005 and 2006."
INSEE is next due to publish unemployment data for August on Thursday but will drop its monthly reports thereafter. ANPE will continue to publish a monthly total of active jobseekers but the figures are not be calculated on the internationally recognised ILO basis.
Eurostat will also continue to publish a monthly estimate of the French unemployment rate on an ILO basis. INSEE had been expected to publish a revised series of ILO unemployment figures for the first half of the year, taking account of the changes, in September. But it said on Monday that these figures would now be published in early November. The daily Le Monde said last week that the new figures would show the July unemployment rate at 8.4 percent rather than the 8.0 percent reported by INSEE last month. The monthly rate reported by INSEE is calculated through a synthesis of its own survey of 75,000 individuals and ANPE's monthly total of active jobseekers.
According to the authors of the report, this method produced significant distortions and dropping it would bring France closer into line with international practice. INSEE's quarterly survey will adopt criteria used by Eurostat which has a different definition of active jobseekers and which takes France's overseas departments into account in making its calculations. The report also recommended that INSEE should increase the sample size used to calculate its jobless data.
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