17:31 10 December 2019
Moody’s: Poland to be strongly affected by labor shortages
Poland, Hungary, and Romania are three countries where employee shortages can translate into the largest credit risk, according to a report by Moody’s rating agency. The shortage of employees in Central and Eastern Europe is the largest in Europe, the authors of the report pointed out, adding that it is now much larger than in the past. According to Moody’s, over a third of companies in the region reported problems with employee availability in the third quarter of this year.
Emigration is one of the reasons for the shortages. In its May report, Moody’s forecasted that the population of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary will decrease by approximately 2.5 million by 2040, while the number of people working in these four countries is to decrease by around 5 million in this period due to demographic changes and the aging of the population.
Poland may enjoy a large number of economic migrants from Ukraine, who already in 2017 accounted for 4% of all employees in the country. In 2012-2018, the number of immigrants insured in the state social security system increased six-fold.
However, even increased emigration is not able to fill the gap in the Polish employee base: according to the Polish Economic Institute, there are currently 140,000 vacancies in Poland and if nothing changes, that number will rise to one million in 2030.
(300gospodarka)
