Unemployment in Poland falls below 5% for first time since 1990

Unemployment in Poland has fallen below 5% for the first time since 1990, when the country was beginning its post-communist transition.

New data from state statistical agency GUS show that the unemployment rate fell to 4.9% in June, down from 5% in May. The reading was in line with analysts’ expectations.

The last time GUS recorded a lower figure was in August 1990, when the rate stood at 4.5%. Unemployment peaked at 20.7% in February 2003. The total number of unemployed people in Poland last month, 762,200, was the lowest since July 1990.

According to the Polish Economic Institute (PIE), the drop in the unemployment rate is a result of the good labour market situation but also demographic changes, with Poland’s shrinking and ageing society resulting in a decline in the number of professionally active people.

Economists at PKO, a bank, note that the fall in unemployment “is not unequivocally good news”. While unemployment usually dips in June, this year’s fall is weaker than in recent years (with the exception of the pandemic year 2020), “reflecting subdued labour demand,” they wrote on social media.

GUS’s new data show that the number of people employed in Poland fell in the first quarter by 138,000 compared to the same quarter last year, to 17.19 million.

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GUS also reported in June 2022 that unemployment had fallen to 4.9%. However, this reading was later revised to 5.2% after the agency changed its methodology to include new data on people working on farms.

Poland currently also has the European Union’s second-lowest unemployment rate. In May, the latest month for which Eurostat data are available, Poland’s rate stood at 3%, higher only than the Czech Republic (2.7%).

The highest rates were recorded in Spain (11.7%), Greece (10.6%) and Sweden (8.4%). The figure across the EU as a whole was 6%.

Eurostat’s figures for Poland differ from those of GUS as the two agencies use different methodologies to calculate the unemployment rate.

Main image credit: Nicholas Lim / Pexels

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.