BERLIN, July 1 (Xinhua) -- Despite a slight drop in unemployment figures in June, the economic slowdown was noticeable on the German labor market, the German Federal Employment Agency (BA) announced on Monday.
"The weaker economic development leaves a slight mark on the job market," said Detlef Scheele, head of the German Employment Agency.
"The number of registered jobs is declining at a high level and employment growth is losing momentum," Scheele noted.
In June, the number of unemployed persons in Germany was 20,000 less than the previous month and 60,000 fewer than a year earlier, according to the BA.
The total of unemployed persons in Germany fell to 2.216 million while the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.9 percent, the employment agency announced.
"The sharp rise in seasonally adjusted unemployment from May did not continue in June," Holger Schaefer, senior economist for employment and unemployment at the German Economic Institute (IW), told Xinhua on Monday.
"However, there are still signs of a slowdown: the number of recipients of unemployment benefits is rising, while the number of job vacancies is lower than in the same month last year for the first time since 2013" in Germany, Schaefer commented.
The demand from German companies for new employees was noticeably weaker, with 8,000 fewer vacancies reported to the Federal Employment Agency in June than last year.
Nonetheless, according to current data from the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), the number of people employed in Germany continued to rise.
According to Destatis, there were 45.3 million people employed in Germany in May, a year-on-year increase of 462,000.
