Unemployment in the euro zone has fallen below the symbolic mark of 10% for the first time since April 2011, EU data showed today.
The Eurostat statistics agency said the jobless rate in the euro zone fell to 9.8% in October, driven by falls in France and Italy.
The September rate was revised to 9.9% from the 10% first given last month.
The outcome was much lower than estimated in a survey of analysts by Bloomberg which put October unemployment unchanged at 10%.
One of the lowest jobless rate was in powerhouse Germany, at 4.1%, while the highest rates were in debt-laden Greece at 23.4% and Spain with 19.2%.
Unemployment in the full 28-nation EU also fell to 8.3% in October from 8.4% in September, Eurostat said.
Unemployment in the single currency bloc had hit a record high of 12.1% during the worst of the debt crisis.
The improvement since then has been painfully slow, with the economy still well short of the 7.5% jobless rate seen before the 2007-08 financial crash.
By headcount, there were some 15.9 million people without jobs in the euro zone in October, down 190,000 from September and 1.8 million fewer compared with October 2015.
