The Eurozone labour market lost a little ground at year-end. Following a revised 59,000 increase in November, joblessness rose a further 23,000 to 11.048 million. The headline unemployment rate was unchanged, but at November's upwardly amended 6.6 percent and so a tick above the market consensus. However, this was still a record-equalling low.

Regionally, the steady overall rate masked a 0.1 percentage point dip to 2.9 percent in Germany and a 0.1 percentage point increase to 7.1 percent in France and to 13.1 percent in Spain. Italy (7.8 percent) was flat.

The December update and November revision suggest that the Eurozone labour market is starting to cool. This will come as some relief to the ECB. Nonetheless, conditions remain very tight and so are still likely to put upside pressure on wages. As such, the central bank's tightening mode is not about to go away anytime soon. To this end, today's suite of data puts the Eurozone's ECDI at 28 and the ECDI-P at 26, both measures still indicating overall economic outperformance versus expectations.

Consensus for December's unemployment rate is no change at 6.5 percent.

The unemployment rate measures the number of unemployed as a percentage of the labor force.

Unemployment data are closely monitored by the financial markets. These data give a comprehensive report on the state of the economy and its future direction. A rising unemployment rate can be a warning sign of hard times while a low rate can be a warning of inflation as wages are bid up to attract labor.

Unemployment data are expressed in both a numerical value and as a percentage of the labor force. Generally, the definition of those unemployed follows that of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). It states that an unemployed person is one between the ages of 15 to 74 years of age who was not employed during the reference week, had actively sought work during the past four weeks and was ready to begin working immediately or within two weeks. The unemployment rate is the percentage of unemployed persons over the total number of active persons in the labor market. Active persons are those who are either employed or unemployed.

Eurostat provides an unemployment rate for each EU country as well as for the EMU and EU as a whole. It should be noted that the unemployment rate for a country will frequently differ with that reported by the national statistics agency. That is because of the varying interpretations of the ILO definition by member states and Eurostat.