But before I do that, and just to get us in the swing of things, here is an extract from a useful little article I noticed in Portfolio Hungary today. It is about Esztergom, and how more than 42% of the 6,300 employees at the Hungarian plant of Japanese automaker Suzuki located in Esztergom are in fact Slovakian citizens, which indirectly makes the Esztergom factory the third-largest Slovakian car maker, at least according to Hisashi Takeuchi, Deputy CEO of Suzuki Hungary speaking to the Slovakian daily Pravda. This sort of emphasises the extent to which the labour market in this part of the world is often a regional rather than a national one.
Well coming back to that employment data from KSH, Hungary's rate of unemployment ticked up to 7.3% year on year in the August-October period from 7.2% in the third quarter. According to KSH the number of unemployed was 310,800 and the number of employed 3.940m during the August-October period. The latter figure compares with 3.947 m in Q3 and 3.956 m in the same period of 2006. The number of unemployed rose by 3,900 from the previous 3-m period and was down by 6,500 from the reading in the same period of 2006.
Let's take a look at some of the recent data by quarters. Firstly the unemployed (taking the 15 to 64 age group):
As we can see, despite the low growth rate in Hungary unemployment has dropped back somewhat from its peak. And now for the movements in the employed population, where again we will notice that while the numbers of those officially employed dropped back somewhat in the first quarter, this situation has now been recovered to some extent.
The labour market activity of the population aged 15-74 was 55.1% in Aug-Oct, unchanged from the previous three-month period and down by 0.2ppt from the same period last year. The employment rate of the population aged 15-64 was 57.6% in the period examined, down 0.1ppt from both July-Sept this year and Aug-Oct 2006.
The jobless rate for the 15-24 year old, representing 18.8% of all unemployed, was 18.2%, down 2 percentage points from the same period last year. The KSH said 45.6% of all unemployed have been seeking jobs for a year or more (vs. 47.4% in the previous 3 months).
The average duration of joblessness came to 16.5 months, down from 17.1 months in the previous 3-m period
1 comment:
As noted in the previous post, the relatively good employment statistics has more of an institutional than a macroeconomic cause. For the first time formerly 'free' public health goods are connected to being insured and payed by the employer or being recognized unemployed or inactive. The possibility of loosing access to public health services has brought many people to the legal labor market, especially in construction and tourism. This is a very good news from a public finance point of view, but in terms of macroeconomics this in not new employment, these people have worked close to the somewhat high minimum wage illegaly.
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