South African said on Tuesday that unemployment rate in the country remained almost unchanged between September 2004 and 2005 although 658,000 jobs were created in that time.

Liz Gavin, acting deputy director general of population and social statistics said in Pretoria at the release of the Labor Force Survey: "The unemployment rate has increased only slightly by 0.5 percent from 26.2 percent in September 2004 to 26.7 percent in September 2005."

The figures, which were collected from interviews with members of over 30,000 households, found that more than 12 million South Africans had jobs in September last year, according to the survey.

The figure brought the percentage of working age South Africans (between 15 and 65) who had employment to 40 percent.

Half of the 1.1 million new jobs created between September 2001 and September 2005 were in the trade sector, Gavin said.

However, local analysts said that in fact, the unemployment rate is much higher than the official figure about 40 percent in the whole country. High unemployment is one of the major factors to the high crime rate in South Africa.

Source: Xinhua