Unemployment rate not showing real labor activity
23:59
Eurostat's data on unemployment put us in a very good light. Only in the Czech Republic is the unemployment rate lower than ours – which places us among the top European countries. However, experts warn against the excessive optimism that European statistics may arouse in us. Eurostat uses a different methodology for calculating unemployment than our state-run GUS. The main difference is the professional activity rate, which is not calculated by Eurostat – and in Poland, it has been well below the EU average for years. In the pandemic year, professional activity decreased even more. This can be seen very clearly in the economies of Italy and France, where the majority of unemployed people no longer even want to report to employment offices. They do not declare in the surveys that they would like to find employment. This is a much more dangerous phenomenon than rising unemployment. Occupational deactivation can be much more permanent and destructive for entire social groups.
“We are at a stage where most of the labor markets are frozen and jobs are artificially sustained. This generates paradoxes – because there are economies that have hardly changed unemployment as a result of the pandemic. Therefore, the key indicator of recent quarters is not only the unemployment rate – but also the extent to which we observe the process of deactivation and inactivity by individual employees,” Andrzej Kubisiak, an expert of the Polish Economic Institute (PIE) told the eNewsroom website.
“The level of professional deactivation in Poland in the second quarter of 2020 was above 1 percent of the size of the Polish labor market. This is quite a big increase. In the third quarter, it was possible to rebuild it – except for one age group of young people. It is the young people who suffer the most from this crisis – both on the side of rising registered unemployment and on the side of deactivation. Even after recovering from the pandemic and crisis, a generation of young people will experience the consequences of what is happening today in European labor markets,” Kubisiak predicts.
