Romania's unemployment rate hikes to 6.9% in Q1, on international labor standards

The unemployment rate, calculated for persons aged 15 - 74 who do not have a job but are willing to work and have looked for a job in the past month, hiked to 6.9 percent in the first quarter of the year, 1.1 percentage points on the previous quarter, the country's statistics body INS announced.

Data published by INS and calculated according to the standards of the International Labor Organization (ILO) also showed that the jobless rate was 0.6 percentage points higher in the first three months of the year on the similar period of 2008.

Some 7.9 percent of men were unemployed, compared to just 5.5 percent of women. The urban areas saw a jobless rate of 7.5 percent, compared to 6 percent in the rural areas.
The ILO unemployment rate reported the highest level of 21.3 percent among youngsters aged 15 to 24.

Romania's active population stood at 9.705 million persons in the first quarter, a drop from 9.8 million in the past quarter, out of which some 666,000 Romanians were recorded as unemployed.

The occupancy rate in Romania amounted to 57.4 percent in the first three months of the year, still 12.6 percentage points short of the 70 percent target established for 2010 through the Lisbon Strategy.

Number of unemployed in Romania peaks at 548,930 in June, following 12 months of hikes

The number of jobless persons in Romania climbed 22,127 in June to 548,930, a maximum of the past three yeas and four months, exceeding by large the initial estimate of the Labor Ministry for the end of the year, data of the national labor force agency (ANOFM) show.

Out of the total number of unemployed, 435,765 (79.4 percent) come from the private sector.

This is the twelfth consecutive month of growth in the jobless rate. The number of unemployed rose by 62.8 percent the previous month on June 2008, when it stood at 337,084. Such a high rate was last recorded in February 2006, when the jobless number counted 554,585.

The unemployment rate hiked in June to 6 percent from 5.8 percent in May. Some 290,281 jobless of the total received an unemployment allowance.

The highest unemployment rates were reported for the counties of Vaslui (12.1 percent) and Mehedinti (10.6 percent) and the lowest ones for Ilfov (1.5 percent) and Bucharest (1.8 percent).

Labor Minister Marian Sarbu declared at the beginning of June that the unemployment rate could climb to 8 percent by year-end, which would translate into 720,000 jobless, in the most pessimistic scenario.

Curierul National