Unemployment in Selected EU Countries

Biruta Skrętowicz

Institute of Sociology, Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology, Maria Curie Skłodowska University

Michał Wójcik

Institute of Sociology, Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology, Maria Curie Skłodowska University

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to compare the dynamic of unemployment in the years 2000-2014 in selected EU countries. The subject of the present analysis is unemployment in total population and in subpopulations identified on the basis of gender, age, and education. The notion of unemployment rate was used throughout, and its values were taken from the Internet database Eurostat. The analysis conducted makes it possible to draw the following conclusions. The differentiation of total unemployment rate among the selected EU countries was very high, and the shape of the curves reflected the impact of economic crisis. Around 2010 many countries saw stabilising tendencies (with the exception of Greece and the countries located in the Iberian Peninsula). In the countries with low unemployment rates the surplus of female unemployment is giving way to a gender balance, or even a slight surplus of male unemployment. Among the selected age categories, the youngest group was and continues to be most heavily affected by the situation on the labour market. A high level of education is still correlated with a lower risk of unemployment; nevertheless the growing differences between the countries constitute a troubling trend.

Keywords:

labour market, unemployment rate, unemployment dynamics, European Union Labour Force Survey