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Is southern Europe bridging the employment gap with the north? Greek, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian regions are showing significant job rate growth.
The EU region with the highest employment rate is the archipelago of Åland in Finland (86.4%).
This small Swedish-speaking community in the Baltic Sea leads the latest Eurostat release on jobs, closely followed by a string of central European capital cities: Warsaw (86.2%), Bratislava (85.4%), and Budapest (85.3%).
The new stats come as EU authorities herald a “historic” 75.8% record employment across the bloc for people aged 20 to 64, thanks to a 2.7% increase from 2021.
It also means that the EU may be on track to meet the 78% employment target set for 2030 by the European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan.
The strategy lays out 20 key principles to secure “fair and well-functioning labour markets and social protection systems”.
That also includes having 60% of the EU workforce in training every year and reducing the number of people at risk of poverty and social exclusion by 15 million.
Which regions have already reached the employment target?
Out of 243 regions with available data, 113 (or 46.5%) have already reached or passed the 78% mark.
Aside from countries with fewer than two million people, most of these high-performing clusters are in northern Europe.
More precisely, in the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Denmark and the Czech Republic, all single regions have an employment rate of at least 78%.
Germany also ranks high. The country has only three of its 38 departments still below target — namely Berlin, Bremen and Düsseldorf.
At the opposite end, and excluding overseas territories, like non-metropolitan France, or Spain’s enclaves Ceuta and Melilla on the northern coast of Africa, Italy holds seven of the 10 EU regions with the worst reported rates: Calabria (48.5%), Campania (49.4%) and Sicily (50.7%).
Other clusters with low rates were found in south-west Spain, southern Romania and eastern Greece, while the Belgian departments of Brussels and Hainaut stand out as the only western European territories under 65%.
Tourism drives Greece’s growth: How long will it last?
Although southern Europe still largely lags behind, many of its regions are showing some of the fastest-growing rates across the EU.
A Euronews analysis of Eurostat data — covering regions of at least 300,000 — shows that employment in several Greek regions has skyrocketed since 2021.
The surge is largely driven by a significant rebound in the tourism and hospitality sectors following COVID-19, according to Theodore Koutroukis, labour market professor at Thrace University.
Whether Greece’s growth can continue at the same pace remains uncertain.
Similar is the case for other regions of southern Europe, though less pronounced. Job growth patterns have been observed in regions of Spain, Italy, Croatia and Portugal. At the other end of the spectrum — with negative employment trends — are almost exclusively northern European regions.
Between 2021 and 2024, EU regional employment rates fell the most in central Sweden (-2.1%) and in central and western Lithuania (-1.4%). Most regions showing a decline, however, are German.
“The fall in the employment rate largely reflects that many regions in Germany have experienced a long economic recession, particularly in the manufacturing sector”, said Claus Schnabel, Chair of Labour and Regional Economics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
What about the labour market in the Nordic Region?
The ideal of a good working life has been central to the evolution of the welfare state, the growth of business and the personal development of the people of the Nordic Region. The joint labour market is a cornerstone of the Nordic Region.
Unemployment.
Compared to the rest of Europe, unemployment is low in the Nordic Region as a whole. However, both Sweden and Finland are slightly higher than the European average.
Part-time work
More women than men work part-time in the Nordic countries. Part-time jobs are more common in the Nordic countries than in the EU as a whole. While the option to take part-time work has a positive effect on the overall employment rate for women, it also has a negative effect on women’s economic status. It leads to inequality in the number of hours worked, and ultimately to lower lifetime earnings.
Cross-border commuting
The Nordic Region has a vision of being the most sustainable and integrated region in the world by 2030. This goal makes it interesting to follow trends in cross-border labour mobility. Commuting in the Øresund Region is one indicator of this.
Cross-border commuting in the Øresund Region
Commuting in the Øresund region.
Source: Nordic Statistics Database Get the data (Opens in a new page)
More facts about the Nordic labour market
The Nordic Statistics database for the labour market presents data for employment, unemployment and cross-border commuting.
The Nordic Statistics database for the labour market (Opens in a new page)
