Eurostat – the statistics office of the EU – has published the data relating to unemployment in the EU, according to which the rate of 6.9% in the Eurozone remains unvaried in September 2007 over the previous month (compared with 7.81% in August 2006), while a slight reduction from 6.8% to 6.7% was registered for the 27 member states as a whole. The lowest percentages were registered in Denmark and Holland (3.3%), while Slovakia (11.1%) and Poland (9.1%) still present a worrying situation in spite of the highly positive triennial trend. Only three countries show a negative trend over the last twelve months: Portugal (from 7.5% to 8.3%), Ireland (from 4.4% to 4.7%) and Luxembourg (from 4.7% to 5%). Altogether, Eurosat calculates that the unemployed in the European Union total 15.8 million (over 2.5 million less than last year). Yet the EU unemployment figures altogether remain higher than those in the USA (4.6%) and in Japan (3.8%).
