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According to data from the Office of Statistics of the Republic, both the employment rate and the unemployment rate fell
According to data from the Republic Office of Statistics, in the second quarter of the current year, the employment rate in Serbia decreased by 0.5 percent to 48.2 percent, while the unemployment rate decreased by 2.5 percent and amounts to 7.3 percent. There are 33,200 fewer employees and 87,400 fewer unemployed than in the first quarter of 2020.
Photo: FoNet / Nenad DjordjevicA survey by the Office of Statistics of the Republic shows that in the second quarter of this year, the number of employees was 2,844,200 people, while there were 222,900 unemployed.
Economist Milan R. Kovačević told Danas that there may be a decrease in the number of employed and unemployed, statistically.
– It happens, for example, that people who are employed leave the country and that way they are no longer counted among the employees, and then that number decreases. As regards the unemployed, the structure of people that the Office of Statistics of the Republic counts as unemployed is not clear enough. If taken into account, it can be rightly stated that the number of people who are out of work in Serbia is much higher than the figure officially shown in the statistics, says Kovacevic.
The honorary president of the Serbian Employers’ Union, Nebojsa Atanackovic, also believes that it is quite common for employment and unemployment to decrease at the same time.
– In the epidemic that our country is experiencing, some companies continue to work successfully and accept new labor. Others have traffic problems and are forced to lay off workers. When they lose their jobs, they have to find new ones. All this causes that at a time, like this caused by the coronavirus, there is a decrease in both categories, that is, the number of employed and unemployed – explains our interlocutor.
On the other hand, union representatives do not believe in the accuracy of the figures from the Republic Statistics Office, especially regarding the number of unemployed in Serbia.
Zoran Stojiljković, president of the united branch unions “Nezavisnost”, says on behalf of Danas that the number of unemployed in Serbia is much higher than official statistics show.
– The Office of Statistics of the Republic reports on various categories of formal employees. Only those citizens who are employed for a defined and indefinite period of time are not included in that figure. That is, there are employers and people who are engaged in agriculture, but also those who have done some work or have been involved in some commercial activity during a certain period. In other words, the statistics also include people who did some occasional or temporary work, but outside of that period are objectively unemployed. We also have a situation where a lot of people are leaving the country, which is why they are eliminated from the statistics of the National Employment Service. This leads to a situation where, statistically speaking, the number of employed and unemployed drops by one point. If you look at the real indicators, the number of unemployed in Serbia is much higher than the one shown and amounts to around a million people, says Stojiljković.
Zeljko Veselinovic, president of the United Serbian Trade Unions “Sloga”, agrees with his opinion on this.
– It is completely clear that the figure presented by the Office of Statistics of the Republic is irrelevant. The institution has been adjusting this data for years to show that the number of employees is growing and the number of unemployed is decreasing. In practice, of course, this is not the case. It is enough that someone worked only one day a year and in all the others he was unemployed for the Office of Statistics of the Republic to present him as an employee, although objectively he is not. The same applies to all those who engaged in temporary and occasional jobs. This is completely absurd because in practice these are unemployed people who occasionally have a job. The actual number of unemployed in Serbia is around a million people, and not many times less, as official statistics show, says Veselinović.
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