Most abrupt increase in unemployment since 1992

The last two years have been the harshest on the labour market since 1990, reveals a survey by Friedrich Ebert Romania Foundation. Unemployment rose from 3.7% in the summer of 2008 to 7.4% in July 2010.

Month by month 20,000 or 30,000 people would be made redundant and register with employment agencies to collect unemployment benefits.

“The annual rate of increase in the number of people laid off in the economy is the most abrupt since 1992. In only 18 months since mid 2008, their number has gone up by more than 100% reaching 741,000 people. The cause of this increase in the number of unemployed is not the same as in the previous somewhat similar two episodes of 1997-1998 and 2001-2002,” reveals the survey by Laurian Lungu, who teaches at Cardiff Business School in the UK and is head of research at
the Group of Applied Economics.
Though unemployment rate is now down at 7.43%, it will continue to rise, because the public sector employees laid off are not showing in the official statistics yet.