There has been some rare good news on jobs in France.
A total of 52,200 new posts were created in the three months to the end of September, helped by by a 29,600 increase in temp jobs.
That was the fastest pace since just before the financial crisis in 2007 and comes after the country’s steepest monthly fall ever in jobless claims in September.
The eurozone’s second largest economy is still suffering an unemployment rate of around 10 percent of the workforce, but these slight signs of improvement will be some relief to President Francois Hollande who has so far failed to deliver on promises to cut the jobless rate.
Hollande has said he will not run for a second term in 2017 unless he has steered unemployment onto a convincingly downward path.
With one of the highest birth rates in Europe, France needs to create more jobs than its neighbours to offset the rise in the labour force and get the jobless rate to fall.