The following is a press release from Statistiska Centralbyran, or SCB, the Swedish central government authority for official statistics.

STOCKHOLM--The LFS figures for February 2012 as a whole continue to indicate that there is a slowdown on the labour market.

In February 2012 the number of employed persons aged 15-74 amounted to 4,576 000 (±34,000). This is no statistically significant change compared to the same month last year. Seasonally adjusted the number of employed persons was 4.64 million. The employment rate was 64.5 (±0.5)% in the original data and 65.4% in the seasonally adjusted data. The number of permanently employed in February 2012 was 3.5 million (±36,000), an increase of 78,000. At the same time the number of temporarily employed was 591,000 (±28,000), a decrease of 43,000.

On average, the number of hours worked in February amounted to 153.0 (±1.6) million per week, not seasonally adjusted.

In February 2012 the number of unemployed persons aged 15-74 amounted to 389 000 (±21,000), which corresponds to an unemployment rate of 7.8 (± 0.4)%.

According to seasonally adjusted data the number of unemployed persons amounted to 0.38 million, resulting in an unemployment rate of 7.5%.

The number of persons outside the labour force in February 2012 was 2,134,000 (±34,000), which corresponds to 30.1% of the population.

Statistics Sweden Web site: www.scb.se