THE REGISTERED jobless rate in Slovakia shrank by 0.38 percentage points over October, reaching 7.92 percent at the end of the month. That was a drop of 1.35 percentage points from October 2006, according to the National Labour, Social Affairs and Family Office.
The registered jobless rate is calculated from the number of job seekers able to take a job immediately. There were 206,071 of these job seekers at the end of October, the SITA newswire reported on November 20.
That number dropped by 9,902 people from September, and 31,073 people from October 2006.
The unemployment rate calculated from the total number job seekers was 9.17 percent in October. This was a 0.26 percentage-point decline from the previous month and a 1.42 percentage-point drop from last October.
Labour offices reported a total of 238,447 job seekers at the end of October, down by 6,806 people from September and 32,577 people from October 2006.
Unemployment dropped in all eight regions of Slovakia in October, according to labour office figures. The Nitra Region reported the biggest drop of 0.49 points, to 7.27 percent.
The Banská Bystrica Region had the highest jobless rate of 13.9 percent, down 0.36 points. The Bratislava Region continues to report the lowest unemployment rate. At the end of October it was 2.04 percent, down 0.18 percentage points.
The figures of the Slovak Statistics Office, which uses a different methodology to calculate the jobless rate, are different. According to its latest numbers, the unemployment rate in the second quarter of 2007 was 11.1 percent, which is the lowest since the end of 1996.
