Macropolis

were unemployed in the fourth quarter 2015, 94.6 percent remained out of work in the first quarter 2016, in what is the highest rate in the European Union, data from Eurostat has shown.

Only 4.3 percent of jobless Greeks moved into employment and 1.1 percent towards economic inactivity in the first three months of the year.

Only Malta (3.1 percent) Bulgaria had a lower figure (3.2 percent) of unemployed moving into work. However, in both these countries, a considerably higher figure (18.5 and 14.5 percent, respectively) of unemployed moved into the economic inactivity category.

On the other end of the scale, Denmark (30.3 percent), Sweden (22.5 percent) and Austria (22.3 percent) were the EU states with the highest rates of unemployed entering the workplace.

On average in the EU, 15.4 percent of the unemployed (or 3 million people) moved into employment while 18.9 percent (or 3.7 million people) entered the economic inactivity category in the first quarter of 2016.

However, the situation in Greece has improved marginally year-on-year, with Eurostat noting that the proportion of people in Greece moving from unemployment to employment from late 2015 to early 2016 increased by 0.6 percentage point compared with the flows between the same two quarters of 2014/2015, while the share of those remaining unemployed decreased by 1.2 percentage points.

Nevertheless, Greece’s figures remain well below the EU year-on-year averages, where the proportion of jobless returning to work increased by 1.6 percentage point and the share of those remaining unemployed decreased by 2.6 percentage points.

Eurostat’s quarterly labour market flows are based on non-seasonally adjusted labour market data from the EU Labour Force Survey.