French quarterly unemployment at 9.3 pct, down 0.4 pct: official data

The unemployment rate in France went down by 0.4 percentage point to 9.3 percent during the first three months of this year compared to that of the last quarter of 2016, official data showed on Thursday.

According to the National Statistics Institute Insee, 2.674 million people were reported jobless in mainland France over the period, or less 115,000 unemployed people entered the job market in the first quarter of 2017.

With the overseas departments taken into account, the quarterly jobless rate stood at 9.6 percent compared to 10 percent recorded a quarter earlier.

Young people aged from 15 to 24, recorded the lowest jobless rate, with 582,000 young people seeking for a job, down by 1.5 percent.

From January to March, unemployment rate was 9.4 percent for women and 9.2 percent for men, down from 9.5 percent and 9.8 percent respectively.

Assuming power on May 14, centrist French President Emmanuel Macron targets to lower the joblessness rate to 7 percent by 2022.

To that aim, he promised to create public investment scheme worth 50 billion euros (55.57 billion U.S. dollars) to improve training, financing energy transition and modernizing the country's administrative services which are expected to offer wider job opportunities.

In addition, he wants to further reduce high employment charges to incite recruitment. (1 euro = 1.111 U.S.dollar) Endit