According to the EU’s statistical office, the unemployment rate in Poland in December was 2.9%. This is a decrease of 0.1% from 3% in the previous month. Only the Czech Republic recorded lower unemployment – 2.1%. Poland also recorded the highest improvement in the employment rate in Europe during the pandemic. According to Eurostat data, the number of unemployed in Poland amounted to 504.000 in December versus 512.000 a month earlier.
In the entire EU, the unemployment rate in this approach amounted to 6.4% in December and 6.5% in November. The unemployment rate in the eurozone amounted to 7% in December 2021 compared to 7.1% in the previous month.
Eurostat measures the harmonized unemployment rate as the percentage of unemployed people aged 15-74 who were able to take up employment in the following two weeks and who were actively looking for a job in the past weeks regarding the economically active people in the country.
The latest Eurostat data also shows that Poland recorded an improvement in the employment rate by 2.4% during the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic. This is the highest rate of all EU countries.
The Netherlands came second with an increase of 2.3%, followed by Slovakia (an increase by 2%). For the entire EU, this indicator in the analyzed period since 2019 increased by 0.1%, which means that after pandemic fluctuations, it returned to the level before COVID-19. The employment rate decreased the most in Romania – by 4.6%. Poland’s neighbors, Germany and the Czech Republic were also under the line, with the indicators -0.2 and -0.3 pp, respectively.
In the third quarter of 2021, the employment rate of people aged 20-64 in the European Union was 73.5% (increased by 0.7% compared to the second quarter), and the gap in the labor market decreased to 12.9%. In the period from the second to the third quarter of last year, 3.8 million unemployed people found work in the EU, which constitutes 24.4% of the total of all unemployed people recorded at that time. In the third quarter of 2021, unemployment in the EU returned to its pre-crisis level.
Arkadiusz Słomczyński