Unemployment Falls Across Emerging Europe

In new data from European statistic office Eurostat, it has been revealed that many Central and Eastern European regions saw low levels of unemployment in 2017, with Poland having one of the lowest rates, just behind the Western European economies of Britain and Germany. This news comes after the World Bank raised its growth forecasts for the Polish economy.

Eurostat claimed that of the 275 regions assessed across Europe, 56 had an unemployment rate of 3.8% or less–half the EU average–including 21 regions in Germany, 13 in Britain, seven in the Czech Republic, three in Hungary and Austria, two in Poland and Romania, and one in Bulgaria, Emerging Europe reported.

The lowest rate for unemployment was in the Czech Republic, where the rate has decreased 1.1% since 2016. One of the lowest long-term unemployment rates was recorded in Bucharest and the surrounding region of Ilfov in Romania, where it is 13.8%.

Eurostat also revealed that unemployment rates in the European Union fell to a new 10-year low (7.1%) in February 2018, while unemployment in the eurozone hit 8.5%, the lowest since 2008.

Overall, unemployment rates have decreased in most states, with more than 80% of the NUTS 2 (statistical regions of the European Union) regions seeing youth unemployment fall between 2016 and 2017. Despite this, Eurostat commented that “regional differences in the unemployment rate for young people are however marked…in more than three-quarters of the EU regions, the unemployment rate for young people was at least twice that of total unemployment.”