As of June 30, the working age population in Vietnam has decreased by 10,200 from the same period last year to stand at 47.3 million people, the Quan doi Nhan dan (People’s Army) reported.

The paper quoted Nguyen Thi Xuan Mai, head of the Population and Employment Department under the General Statistics Office as saying that the total number of working people, including those who are still working in spite of their old age, is estimated at 52.7 million, up 300,000 year-on-year.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate among people of working age is 2.14 percent, with the rate in urban areas higher than that in rural regions (3.62 percent against 1.47 percent), said Mai.

She added that 6.32 percent of youngsters aged from 15 to 24 are out of work. The rate is 11.87 percent in urban areas and 4.54 percent in rural ones.

However, Mai noted that Vietnam is still in the first stage of a golden population structure. This means that for every two people working, there is only one dependent person.

The structure is a chance to utilise the plentiful human resources for socio-economic development and improvement of the human resource for better social welfare, health care, education and jobs for the future.-VNA