Hungary’s registered jobless rate climbed to a 10-year high of 8.1% in the three months to January, up 0.6 points from a year earlier, according to the latest data by the national statistics office KSH.
The KSH said the drop in employment can be put down mainly to the fact that many seniors took early retirement last year after the government amended rules on calculating pensions. Falling construction sector output and the low number of subsidized jobs were also to blame, the agency said.
The number of jobholders fell by 67,000 to 3.87 million, or 56.5% of the population aged 15-64, while the number of people on the dole rose 25,000 during the same period.
Nearly half of the registered jobseekers have held no jobs for more than a year, bringing the average period of unemployment to 16.2 months.
Don’t get the explanation. If anything, early retirement should reduce the unemployment. Those who retire create job openings and they do not add to the number of people looking for work.
Rolrox,
The article states that early retirement reduced employment, not unemployment.
It seems that the increase in employment may have been due to layoffs by the construction sector.
Sorry, I meant the increase in unemployment was due to layoffs by the construction sector.