France's unemployment rate unexpectedly fell in the first quarter

According to the report from Insee, in Q1 2020, the number of ILO unemployed people decreased by 94,000 to 2.3 million people. The ILO unemployment rate thus fell by 0.3 points in the quarter to 7.8% of the labour force in France excluding Mayotte, after -0.3 points in the previous quarter. Experts expected an increase in unemployment to 8.5%. Last value was 0.9 points lower than its level one year earlier. In metropolitan France, it stood at 7.6%. The unemployment rate decreased for all age groups, and more strongly for men (-0.5 points) than for women (-0.1 points).

The fall in the unemployment rate resulted of a sharp fall in the number of jobless persons declaring themselves available or actively looking for work during the period of lockdown. The confinement period indeed strongly affected both active job search behaviour (for unemployed persons whose preferred sector of activity is at a standstill, for example), and availability of persons (childcare constraint, for example). Overall, ILO unemployment was therefore lower during this period of confinement, but this result did not reflect an improvement in the labour market.

In fact, an ILO unemployed person is a person aged 15 or over who meets the three following criteria: is unemployed during the reference week; is available for work in the next two weeks; has been actively looking for work in the last four weeks or has found a job starting within three months. Based on the observations over the first 11 weeks of the quarter, the effect of the confinement on the average unemployment rate in the first quarter was estimated at -0.4 percentage points. In other words, the unemployment rate that would have been observed in the first quarter in the absence of the confinement would have been virtually stable at 8.2%.