Fiscal Council reveals how we reached HISTORICAL UNEMPLOYMENT RATE

The unemployment rate in Serbia dropped in the second quarter only because fewer people were looking for work, said today chief economist of the Fiscal Council Danko Brcerevic.

„The overall trends on the labour market in the second quarter were unfavorable, which is completely expected,“ Brcerevic told the Beta agency.

Serbian Finance Minister Sinisa Mali said yesterday that the unemployment rate in the second quarter of 2020 was „at a historical minimum of 7.3 percent.“

Brcerevic said that „the number of employees was actually reduced by over 70,000, i.e. 2.5 percent compared to the previous year and that this is a key indicator to be considered on the labour market“.

„The unemployment rate is not so relevant at the moment, and the fact that it was at a historical minimum of 7.3 percent in the second quarter does not mean much „, said Brcerevic.

He explained that according to the definition of statistics, only those people who were actively looking for a job and could not find it were unemployed.

„Since as many as 150,000 people fewer were looking for a job in the second quarter, in which the state of emergency was introduced, compared to last year, that is the reason why the unemployment rate was sharply reduced, despite the fact that over 70,000 people lost their jobs,“ Brcerevic said, adding that „the data on the low unemployment rate, at the moment, should not be boasted of so much“.

„We expect stabilization“

According to Brcerevic, the government’s measures to preserve jobs were good and prevented a bigger drop in employment than the one that happened.

As he said, this can be seen in the data that all the people who lost their jobs worked in the informal sector, that is, in the part of the economy that could not count on state aid.

In the formal sector, where state aid was paid, employment did not drop in the second quarter, he said.

„Despite somewhat worse overall results in the second quarter, we still expect that in the second half of the year the decline in the number of employees will stabilize at 30,000 to 50,000 people, as we predicted at the beginning of the crisis,“ Brcerevic said.

Izvor: Beta

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