(MENAFN- AFP) Data released Thursday showed that French unemployment fell at the end of last year, suggesting a key campaign promise by President Francois Hollande has indeed been kept. France's INSEE statistics service, using international methods to measure the labour force, calculated the unemployment rate dipped by one percentage point to 9.8 percent in the final quarter of last year.Hollande had pledged during his 2012 campaign to begin to bring down unemployment in 2013, with the date subsequently pushed back to the end of the year.Unemployment benefits claims, another measure of unemployment, have continued to rise in previous months however, hitting a record 3.31 million in January.INSEE calculated the number of unemployed in the October to December period at 2.78 million.Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault welcomed the "good news" and urged quick implementation of plans to boost the competitiveness of French business. Analysts were more cautious, pointing out the improvement was mostly due to people no longer being considered looking for work, and thus no longer unemployed."This is not a good drop in unemployment, because the people no longer unemployed didn't find jobs," said Eric Heyer of the French Economic Observatory at Paris' Sciences-Po University.The INSEE survey, which uses International Labour Organization methodology, is what is used in international statistics and comparisons, but is somewhat stricter in determining who is unemployed than the French administration uses for benefits claims.
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