Number of employees reaches six-year high

The recruitment in the trade sector, administration and technology-related industries has taken the number of employees in the economy to the highest level reached since November 1999, that is 4.59 million people. The number of employees in the economy fell from 4.67 million in November 1999 to 4.3 million in January 2002. It then started on a strong upward trend last year. Most people were recruited in the trade sector and public administration, while the sectors to have seen most redundancies were agriculture and heavy industry. “The increase in the number of employees in the trade sector was due to the increase in imports of goods and the rise in consumption, which created more jobs on the distribution, retail and related services segments,” believes Liviu Voinea, analyst with the Applied Economics Group. The increase in the number of employees is very small, he says, particularly because the number of employees in the industry continued to go down throughout this period. The number of people employed in the economy rose by a mere 39,000, and fell by 83,000 in the industrial sector. This is what the data of the National Statistics Institute show. “The trend is somewhat logical, because we are now in our seventh year of economic growth, and a rallying effect has come up in the economy,” says Voinea. The number of employees had reached 4.59 million by the end of April (the latest data available), a record high for the last six and a half years.