Greece Net Employment inflows in 2014Q4

This will be a quick follow-up post on the 2014Q3 employment figures post. The Greek Ministry of Employment publishes monthly figures of employment announcements by employers on an online registration system called ‘Ergani’. Based on the recently announced numbers for December of 2014 (sorry the document is in Greek) I ‘d like to make a few projections on the current state of unemployment in Greece:

It is quite evident that net employment flows were negative during 2014H2 due to 2014Q4 dynamics (which are not yet reflected on the unemployment survey numbers published by ELSTAT). Compared to 2013 the total difference was 120,000 jobs (from a positive net flow of 43,000 jobs to an outflow of 77,000 employees) with the fourth quarter loosing almost 90,000 jobs, a figure close to three times that of 2013.

Since seasonal adjustment of employment is always a smoothing mechanism which requires a large number of observations my feeling is that October/November monthly employment surveys, as well as the quarterly 2014Q4 survey, will register a significant fall in employment which might result into an increase of the unemployment rate. With a labour force of 4,830 thousand people, the 88,000 jobs shortfall during 2014Q4 is equal to almost 2% which should appear in the unemployment numbers during the upcoming months. Something to definitely keep an eye on.

Greek 2014Q3 unemployment figures

Greek ELSTAT released the unemployment figures for 2014Q3 today which marked the fall of the unemployment rate to 25.5%, down from 27.2% during the corresponding quarter of 2013. Given the positive outlook of the release I ‘d like to take a closer look at the details of Greek employment and if this drop of the unemployment rate really signifies a substantial improvement of the economy.

Based on various tables of the quarterly employment figures I have constructed the following table of certain numbers that I feel are important:

Personally I usually pass through the unemployment rate and go straight to the employment figure. As we can see, although unemployment dropped by 91 thousand people (compared to the same quarter of 2013), employment increased by 53 thousand which resulted in the labor force decreasing by 38,000. What is even more interesting is the fact that a large part of the drop in the labor force was due to a fall of the population over 15yr (-30,000). Obviously the fall in the unemployment rate becomes much less impressive if one looks only at employment while the (steady) fall in the 15+ population and the labor force are certainly not positive signs for the future.

Taking a closer look at the unemployed we see that the fall in that category was only due to people who were unemployed for less than a year while the long-term unemployed actually increased by another 10 thousand to reach close to 930,000 persons. These opposite movements are a worrying sign for the future since they might be indicators for the presence of hysteresis among the long-term unemployment. This will make reducing unemployment much more difficult (given that short-term unemployed are only 6% of the labor force with long-term unemployment reaching 19%).

Moving to employment we observe that the increase came almost entirely from part-time employment. If one also notices that under-employment was the major driver of employment (with under-employed now being close to 6.8% of employment) it is clear that employment growth is driven mainly by short-term, part-time unsecured jobs which probably pay very low salaries. The fall in the unemployment rate actually hides an increase in under-utilization of labor which finds it very hard to enter into full-time steady jobs while long-term unemployed seem to be left out of even these part-time employment opportunities.