Italy’s unemployment rate remained stable in April, but still at 12.6 percent of the workforce. It was the same as in March, which benefited from a slight downward revision from 12.7 percent in the first estimate. <br /><br />That is lower than the average for the first three months of the year, but the jobless trend for young people is still up and the percentage of working-age adults who are in work is still slipping. <br /><br />In the first quarter unemployment hit 13.6 percent – a 0.8 percent increase on the same period last year.<br /><br />Youth joblessness – that is 15- to 24-year-olds – was 46 percent for the whole country, and 60.9 percent in the south. <br /><br />However those in full time education are not counted as being in the workforce in Italy, which makes the numbers seem worse than in other countries. <br /><br />In southern Italy the overall unemployment rate reached 21.7 percent in the first quarter.<br /><br />Trying to recover from recession the Rome government has now agreed to ease rules for firms that take on temporary staff. It is part of a plan to reform the labour laws and encourage more hiring.<br /><br />But reacting to the latest statistics, Giorgio Squinzi, head of the employers’ organisation Confindustria, said: “Let’s not fool ourselves, we’re scraping along the bottom.”
