” “Unemployment is either unchanged or slightly shrinking both within the 27 EU member states and in the euro-zone. After the inflation alert of a few days ago (3.1% in December), today Eurostat published some economic figures that give a picture of the situation in the last few days of 2007. The Statistics Office of the EU Commission explains that the "Business Climate" indicators "seem to be on the decrease". October saw instead a "rise in industrial production prices, by 0.8% in the euro-zone and 1.1% in the 27 EU member states". As to the job market, Eurostat explains that last November, in the 13 states of the euro-zone (on January 1st, they became 15 with the addition of Malta and Cyprus), "the unemployment rate settled at 7.2%, the same as that of one month earlier"; last year. it was 7.9%. Across the EU, this figure was 6.9% as of November 2007 "versus 7.7% as of November 2006". The best performance is that of the Netherlands (2.9% unemployed people) and Denmark (3.2%); the worst is that of Slovakia (11.0%) and Poland (8.5%). The greatest drop in unemployment has been recorded in Poland (from 12.2% to 8.5%) and Bulgaria (from 8.2% to 5.8%).” “
