Slovakia’s unemployment rate in the final quarter of 2009 reached 13.9 percent, which was the highest figure since the first quarter of 2006, the Statistics Office reported on March 4, the TASR newswire wrote.
The overall unemployment rate for the entire year of 2009 stood at 12.1 percent. The number of jobless Slovaks reached 324,200 at the end of the year, which was a 25.9 percent increase year-on-year.
Around 100,000 of the people that were laid off in 2009 had been employed in industry, while 66,600 of the unemployed had never had a job. The third-largest group was made up of former employees in retail and wholesale - 25,600.
The number of employed people went down by 5.5 percent in the last three months of 2009, while the figure for the whole year dropped by 2.8 percent y-o-y. Around 129,000 Slovaks were employed abroad last year, which is 39,000 less than the year before, or a reduction of 23 percent, according to the latest figures quoted by the TASR. TASR
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
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