Jobless Germans total 2.3 mln in March

BERLIN, march 29 (Xinhua) -- The number of people unemployed in Germany fell to 2.3 million in march, the Federal Employment Agency (BA) revealed on Friday.

This was the lowest unemployment figure recorded at the beginning of spring since march 1991, when unemployment in Germany was 2.6 million.

Compared to last month, the number of job seekers in Germany decreased by 72,000 in march. The unemployment rate thereby fell by 0.2 percentage point to 5.1 percent of the German population.

"With the onset of the spring upturn, unemployment and underemployment continued to decline in march. Although the economic momentum has slowed, the labor market continues to perform well overall," said Detlef Scheele, the head of the German employment agency.

Employment continued to rise, partly because German companies have been "securing an increasingly scarce workforce", the BA's monthly report said. The demand for new employees remained at a high level in Germany.

From a national perspective, eastern Germany saw unemployment fall somewhat more than western Germany with declines of 9 percent and 5 percent respectively in an annual comparison.

The German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania had the strongest percentage decline in unemployment with 12.4 percent. The smallest percentage decline in unemployment was in the city state of Bremen, which only declined by 1.5 percent.

"As expected, the labor market is developing in a stable and positive manner. Employment is rising and unemployment is falling," Holger Schaefer, senior economist for employment and unemployment at the German Economic Institute (IW), told Xinhua on Friday.

Particularly encouraging was that "the decline in unemployment was almost exclusively occurring in the Hartz IV unemployment segment" which describes long-term unemployed individuals in Germany.

The German employment agency noted, however, that there was a "weakening trend" in the German employment and unemployment sectors. Although job registrations remained at a comparatively high level, 23,000 fewer vacancies were registered than in the same period last year.