Thorunn Howatt
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Mar 13/02) - There are jobs, jobs and more jobs in the Northwest Territories and most of the new ones are created from diamond and energy exploration.

Since the beginning of the year the territory has boasted the highest employment rate in the country and it looks like it will just keep getting better. Yellowknife has an overwhelming 82.3 per cent of its population at work but the trend is spreading into some of the smaller communities, according to the GNWT Bureau of Statistics.

Last month, 70.3 per cent of the territories' residents were at work.

That's up by 400 people from January's 68.9 per cent. Of 29,300 people who are over 15 years old in the NWT, 20,600 have jobs and 1,700 are unemployed.

That is a 500-person drop in unemployment from January. The territorial unemployment rate dropped to 7.6 per cent from nearly 10 percent in January. Canada as a whole had an unemployment rate of 8.4 per cent in February.

The NWT also has a higher percentage of women in the workforce, at 67.4 per cent than the rest of the country's 55.1 per cent.

The availability of good jobs in the territories has led to one interesting statistic: the number of self-employed entrepreneurs in the territory has decreased steadily for the last six months.

Last September, 2,300 people were their own bosses but in February that number dropped to 1,700.