Employment up and labour market slack down in Q1 2023

In the EU, the employment rate of people aged 20-64 stood at 75.3% in the first quarter of 2023 (Q1 2023), an increase of 0.5 percentage points (pp) compared with the fourth quarter of 2022 (Q4 2022). 

Labour market slack – encompassing those with unmet employment needs, a large part of which includes unemployed individuals – amounted to 11.3% of the extended labour force aged 20-64 in Q1 2023 (-0.1 pp compared with Q4 2022). 

This information comes from data on the labour market in the first quarter of 2023 published today by Eurostat. This article presents only a handful of findings from the more detailed Statistics Explained article.

Source datasets: lfsi_emp_q and lfsi_sla_q

Changes in the employment rate between Q4 2022 and Q1 2023 varied across the EU countries for which data were available. The highest increases were recorded in Bulgaria (+2.8 pp), Croatia (+2.0 pp) and Cyprus (+1.1 pp). 

Source dataset: lfsi_emp_q

While employment rose in 19 EU countries, it remained stable in Latvia and Finland and decreased in 5 EU countries, with the biggest decreases recorded in Slovenia (-1.6 pp), Lithuania (-1.0 pp) and Malta (-0.3 pp).