Iceland’s unemployment rate is below the average of industrialized western nations, according to a new survey from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
The report acknowledges that “the unemployment rate for the OECD area was 8.6% in September 2009, the same as the previous month and 2.3 percentage points higher than a year earlier. In the Euro area, the unemployment rate was 9.7% in September 2009, 0.1 percentage point higher than the previous month and 2.0 percentage points higher than in September 2008. For the United States, the unemployment rate for October 2009 was 10.2%”
By contrast, Iceland’s unemployment rate is currently at about 7.1%. It reached a high of 9% last April, and has been steadily falling ever since, although it has most recently decelerated.
The report also shows that Spain, Ireland, and the Slovak Republic are the only countries surveyed with double-digit ranks for unemployment for September 2009, with 18.3%, 13% and 11.7% unemployment respectively.