Decrease of unemployment: Southern France does better than Northern France

Southern France with very developed service industries experimented in 1998 a better increase in employment than Northern and industrialized France, an INSEE enquiry revealed.

The decrease of unemployment essentially concerns French regions where service industries are predominant, an INSEE enquiry ,published on Wednesday, August 23rd ,revealed. From 1997 to 1998, employment increased by 2.8% in France, which corresponds to 616,000 supplementary jobs. The increase was due to the increase by 3.2% of salaried jobs in service industries (+4.5%, whereas the industry sector showed a 0.2% decrease).These average figures cover the disparities that exist from a region to another, with better results in Southern France, from Aquitaine to PACA, regions where service industries represent between 60 to 80 % of jobs' creation, compared with Northern and Eastern France (except Alsace). Corsica leads with a 6.4% increase.PACA with a more than 80% rate of service industries only realizes medium results (+2.7% of jobs increase compared with an average of 2.8% for the whole France). In Ile de France also there are the same bad results (+2.2%).According to the INSEE both regions represent one third of service industries salaried jobs in France, and if we focus on the number of jobs' creation and not on rates, Ile de France is ranked first and PACA fourth for the year 1998.