Ljubljana - Slovenia's ILO-compatible survey unemployment rate was at 4% in March, down by 0.1 percentage point on February and 1.1 percentage point year-on-year, the Statistics Office said on Friday, estimating there were some 41,000 unemployed people in Slovenia last month.

Half the unemployed aged 15-74 in March were men and half were women. The survey unemployment rate stood at 3.7% for men and 4.4% for women, Statistics Office data shows.

Their latest estimate of the jobless - 41,000 - compares to the 49,000 estimated to be unemployed in December 2021.

They added that the monthly estimates of survey unemployment were model-based experimental statistics and therefore less reliable. Slovenia's registered unemployment figures are indeed considerably higher.

The country's jobless total dropped to some 60,000 at the end of March in what is the second lowest figure on record, but only 16-17% of the registered unemployed were directly employable, the Employment Service said in early April, noting that more than half of the jobless were long-term unemployed.