Annual report for FY 2002 to note dire jobless situation.

TOKYO, May 13 Kyodo

Japan's employment situation has worsened since last year and the regional gap of unemployment has widened, the labor ministry is likely to say in its annual report, due out early July, according to its outline made available Monday.

The outline of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare's 2002 white paper on labor says that unemployment has increased in the Hokkaido, Tohoku, Kyushu and Kansai regions faster than other areas.

To explain the high jobless rates in those regions, including 7.2% in Hokkaido in the January-March period of this year, the ministry's outline cites successive failures of small and midsize companies in the Kansai region, with Osaka at the center.

While unemployed workers who have given up job-seeking efforts are not statistically classified as jobless, the report's draft estimates that Japan's real employment rate, including such workers, tops 10%.

The government's official data put Japan's jobless rate at a record high 5.2% in fiscal 2001, up 0.5 percentage point from the previous year.

In the annual report of some 200 pages to be presented to the cabinet in early July, the ministry will also refer to the prolongation of joblessness among unemployed laborers since the bursting in the early 1990s of the asset-inflated economic bubble, noting that more than 900,000 workers remain unemployed for more than one year.

The report will also mention middle-aged and elderly workers' difficulty in finding new employment and the dire situation of unemployed laborers no longer eligible for unemployment insurance benefits.

The white paper on labor for the previous year analyzed the relationship between employment and advances in information technology.