The fall in employment in Italy in
February after two months of growth was "foreseeable" and did
not "contradict positive signals", Labour Minister Giuliano
Poletti said Tuesday.
The downturn "confirms the evaluation that at the tail end
of a crisis things tend not to be stable," Poletti said.
However, it "does not contradict positive signals such as
the consolidation of renewed business and consumer confidence,"
he added.
The minister's comments came after national statistics
agency Istat released preliminary estimates for February putting
unemployment at 12.7%.
This represented a 0.1% rise over the previous month and a
0.2% rise over the same month in 2014, after a big drop in
December and another fall in January.
"The Istat figures should be read alongside those released
by the national pension institute Inps concerning the drop in
the use of temporary redundancy and those obtained from
mandatory communications in January and February that show an
upturn in the number of open-ended contracts with respect to the
same months in 2014," Poletti added.
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