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South Africa June jobless rate drops marginally; PPI rises in June

The rate of unemployment in South Africa dipped marginally during second quarter of the year, signaling a stable labor market despite repercussions in the world economy on worries surrounding political and financial fallouts. However, the country’s producer price inflation accelerated in June after slowing in the previous three months.

South Africa's unemployment rate dipped slightly to 26.6 percent of the total labor force in the second quarter of the year from 26.7 percent in Q1, data released by Statistics South Africa showed Thursday.  In its quarterly labour force survey which polls households, the statistics agency said that this amounted to 5.634 million people without jobs in the second quarter compared with 5.723 million previously.

The producer price index rose 6.8 percent year-on-year after climbing 6.5 percent in May. Market had predicted a score of 6.7 percent. On a month-on-month basis, the producer price index increased 0.6 percent in June. Economists had predicted a 0.6 percent rise, data from the same agency showed Thursday.

The main contributors to the annual rate were food products, beverages and tobacco products, metals, machinery, equipment and computing equipment and transport equipment, the agency said. Meanwhile, the expanded definition of unemployment, which includes people who have stopped looking for work, ticked higher by 36.4 percent in the second quarter, from 36.3 percent during the first three months of 2016.

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