The British labor market has defied the country’s lingering recession, improving in the second quarter as businesses hired more workers before the Olympic Games, official data showed Wednesday.

The unemployment rate fell to 8.0 percent in the April-June period from 8.1 percent in the three months through May, the Office for National Statistics said, with the number of jobless people falling by 46,000 to 2.56 million.

The improvement came despite the sour economy, which has been in decline since the last quarter of 2011. The Bank of England said last week that gross domestic product fell 0.7 percent in the second quarter from the first quarter, and that the economy would probably stagnate for 2012 as a whole.