The number of people out of work in France fell in July, statistics showed Wednesday, strengthening President François Hollande's case to seek re-election in 2017, reports Dow Jones Business News.
The French president has said he won't run in May's presidential elections if he fails to get unemployment on a downward path by the end of this year, a goal he repeatedly missed during the first four years of his presidency.
The monthly count, which is closely watched in France, adds credibility to Mr. Hollande's claim the job market is improving after a separate measure published by statistics agency Insee last week showed the unemployment rate in France in the second quarter fell to 9.9% from 10.2% in the first.
An improvement in economic growth at the start of 2016 is helping the jobs market, as well as a glut of state- sponsored initiatives to get people into work.
Mr. Hollande has poured tens of billions of euros in recent years into reducing payroll taxes to encourage hiring. At the start of this year he also introduced cash incentives for small companies to hire and launched a plan to create 500,000 places on work training programmes for the unemployed. The figures from the labour ministry showed that those initiatives are starting to have an impact on jobless data as the number of Category D job seekers - defined as jobless people who aren't obliged to seek work because they are sick or in training - rose to 308,900 from 303,900.