Unemployment on a downward path for a year. Unemployment rate is under 6%

The unemployment rate reached 5.92% at the end of March, the 12th consecutive month of decline. Between February and March 2011, over 60,000 unemployed were removed from statistics, while the number of jobless who feature in the records of the National Employment Agency fell to 539,666 in March.

“We’ve said for a long time that the unemployment rate would fall, because it is going towards a normal, downward trend, after rising for several months. I think unemployment will continue to decline until the end of the year, when the rate will stabilise somewhere around 5%, said Silviu Bian, chairman of ANOFM.

The unemployment rate has continued to fall in the past year, although the number of employees has not risen. So, whilst 225,000 unemployed were removed from the statistics from March 2010 until March 2011, the number of employees fell by over 200,000 from March 2010 until January 2011 (the last month for which the National Statistics Institute published data).