Unemployment in Northern Ireland has remained static, while the number signing on in Britain fell to its lowest level since 1975 last month.
The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment said 44,000 people from a workforce of 767,000 in the North were unemployed. The figure, for the three months to July, was unchanged on the previous quarter.
In Britain, the Office for National Statistics said the claimant count in Britain dropped 6,400 to just 943,300 in August, defying City expectations of a small rise. The jobless rate remained at 3.1 percent of the workforce, also a 27-year low.
Britain's labour market has proved very resilient to the slowdown in the global economy over the past year, with unemployment consistently remaining below expectations.
While manufacturers have been furiously cutting jobs, firms in the services sector have carried on recruiting and a big expansion in public services by Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair's Labour government has helped keep dole queues short.
"Job redundancies in the manufacturing and financial sectors continue to be more than offset by aggressive recruitment in the public sector, as well as the retailing and leisure sectors," said Mr John Butler, UK economist at HSBC.
The Minister for Enterprise, Sir Reg Empy, said the figures indicated the region's economic situation was "reasonably healthy".
But manufacturing figures showed output fell 11.4 per cent in the first quarter of the year from the same period in 2001. The figures showed a decrease of 1 per cent in the first three months of the year compared with the previous three months. - (Additional reporting by Reuters)
