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In the second quarter of 2024, the employment rate of people aged 20-64 in the EU stood at 75.8%, an increase of 0.2 percentage points (pp) compared with the first quarter of 2024. 

Labour market slack - encompassing those with unmet employment needs, a large part of which includes unemployed persons - amounted to 11.0% of the extended labour force aged 20-64 in the second quarter of 2024 (a decrease of 0.1 pp compared with the first quarter of 2024).

This information comes from data on the labour market in the second quarter of 2024 published today by Eurostat. This article presents only a handful of findings from the more detailed Statistics Explained article.

Change in employment rate and labour market slack, Q2 2024 - Click below to see full dataset

Source datasets: lfsi_emp_q and lfsi_sla_q

Between the first and the second quarter of 2024, Estonia (+1.0 pp), Lithuania (+0.9 pp) and Czechia (+0.8 pp) registered the highest increases in the employment rate among the 18 EU countries where employment rose. The employment rate remained stable in Italy, Poland and Slovakia and decreased in 6 EU countries, with the biggest decreases recorded in Slovenia (-0.7 pp) and Finland (-0.4 pp).

Change in employment rate, Q2 2024. Bar chart - Click to see full dataset below

Source dataset: lfsi_emp_q

For more information

 

Methodological notes

  • The extended labour force is the total number of people employed, unemployed, and those seeking work but not immediately available, plus those available to work but not seeking. In this article, data cover population aged 20 to 64. 
  • This article uses quarterly and seasonally adjusted data from the EU Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) data.

 

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