Eurostat: Unemployment at 8% in January

The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in Poland stood at 8 percent in January, according to data released by the EU’s statistics office Eurostat. In December the rate was 8.2 percent, while in January 2014 it stood at 9.9 percent. The number of unemployed amounted to 1.398 million in January, versus 1.42 million in the previous month. An unemployed person is defined by Eurostat, according to the guidelines of the International Labour Organization, as someone aged 15 to 74 without work during the reference week who is available to start work within the next two weeks and who has actively sought employment at some time during the last four weeks. The unemployment rate is the number of people unemployed as a percentage of the labour force. The Central Statistical Office (GUS) announced earlier that the unemployment rate at the end of January stood at 12.0 percent. The GUS methodology takes into account the number of registered unemployed in relation to the number of professionally active.