Paris: Eurozone unemployment is still far higher than the average rate across advanced countries, the OECD said on Wednesday just as Britain reported another fall.
However, the outlook for young people -- the "lost" generation -- finding work in the 34 OECD countries is improving slowly.
Across the 18 countries in the eurozone, the unemployment rate in April was 11.7 percent.
This is about half as much again as the overall rate of 7.4 percent across the 34 countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development which published the monthly data.
The rate across OECD countries edged down slightly by 0.1 percentage point in April from the March level, and in the eurozone also by 0.1 points.
One improvement was a sharp fall, of 0.6 percentage points over one month, of the high levels of unemployment among young people in the OECD area, which has led policymakers to speak of a "lost" generation.
In April, 10.7 million young people were unemployed, about a quarter of all OECD-area people without work, even though the total has fallen by 1.3 million over a year.
The figures for unemployment among 15-24 year olds are extremely high in some countries: 56.9 percent in Greece, 53.5 percent in Spain, 43.3 percent in Italy, 36.1 percent in Portugal and 32.9 percent in the Slovak Republic
The latest overall figures mean that across the 34 advanced democracies covered by the OECD, about 45 million people are registered as without work.
On the bright side, this is 4.9 million fewer than at the worst point in April 2010, after the financial crisis.But that is still 10.3 million higher than when the financial crisis began just after July 2008.
Outside the eurozone area, the US unemployment rate fell sharply by 0.4 percentage points in April from the March level to 6.3 percent and was stable in Canada at 6.9 percent and in Japan at 3.6 percent.
More recent data points to a steady US figure, but a slight increase in Canada to 7.0 percent.
Unemployment is usually a lagging indicator, trailing behind economic downturns when businesses cut staff and recruitment, and also behind upturns, although the labour market responds more quickly in both directions in open economies.
Other recent data paints a picture of advanced economies recovering rather sluggishly from the financial and then the eurozone debt crises, and that this pick-up is not rich in job creation, although unemployment has fallen in the United States and Britain and is low in Japan.
On Wednesday, official figures in non-euro Britain showed that the unemployment rate fell to 6.6 percent in the three months to the end of April, the lowest level for five years from 6.8 percent in the three months to the end of March.
This is in parallel with a campaign by the right-centre government to reduce sharply the number of public employees as part of a range of structural reforms.
