Unemployment Rates in Europe

Here's a map I created yesterday with the latest available data:

Central Europe's Love for Germany

Kristína Mikulová, a fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations (and a former correspondent of The Economist), writes for the Huffington Post about the geopolitics of the Visegrád Four countries.

Dates to watch in 2013

11.-12.1. The Czechs elect their president, for the first time by a direct vote 

15.-16.1. Euromoney conference – The Central and Eastern European Forum – will be held in Vienna

14.2. Flash estimates of the 4Q2012 GDP will be released

February - Latvia officially applies for Eurozone membership

19.3. Energy conference "Inside Ukraine" of The Economist magazine to be held in Vienna

22.4. Eurostat published 2012 debt and deficit figures for EU countries

30.4. Slovak Council for Budget Responsibility will publish its first estimate of the country's "net wealth"

2.5. The Governing Council of the ECB will meet in Bratislava, Slovakia

May – ECB's  Convergence Report will most probably conclude that Latvia has met all criteria and may join the Eurozone in 2014

around 20.6. – Eurostat to publish GDP per capita in PPS, the 2012 figures. Slovakia will have matched Portugal and Greece.

1.7. Croatia becomes the 28th member of the EU

around 22.10. – Eurostat will publish estimates whether the countries meet their three-percent public finance deficit targets in 2013

November – TREND magazine awards Slovak firm, bank and an insurance company of the year

Europe according to GDP per capita

Eurostat's data for 2010 supplemented with missing countries (e.g., Ukraine, Kosovo) from the IMF and the World Bank.

Most Productive Regions of the Former Eastern Bloc

Here are the economic centers of Central and Eastern Europe, as seen by the Eurostat and their GDP per capita rank (% of the EU27 average in PPS):

Europe According to Slovaks

My contribution to the "Europe According to" mania :)

Draxler on the elections' results in CZ, SK

http://www.praguepost.com/opinion/4809-the-long-and-winding-road.html

Slovenia, Czech Republic, Slovakia

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are the three richest countries of the former Eastern Bloc with regard to GDP per person. Yet, their living standars still fall behind their Western-European counterparts'. Whereas Slovenia reaches roughly 62% of the Western-European average, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are only at 41-42%, and the rest of the region lies further down the chart. The Economist reports.

Moving This Blog

As my employer finally managed to upgrade its website, I will be moving much of the future posts from this blog to www.trendanalyses.sk (all articles are also in English). See, for example, our recent texts (1, 2) on distorted inflation figures published by the Slovak Statistical Office. RSS channel will soon be available for the TREND Analyses' homepage. Occasionally, however, there might be issues, links, graphs etc. that appear only in this blog, so please remain subscribed.

Unemployment Increasing Despite Season

Despite little smaller GDP decline in the second quarter as well as favorable summer season, registered unemployment in Slovakia continues to grow. In July, it reached 12.1% of labor force, and is expected to grow in the coming months as well. Current unemployment rate increase (4.6 percentage points annually) is the largest ever, and joblessness is now reaching highest levels since 2004. Strained labor market, where supply of labor abundantly exceeds the demand for it, is caused by global economic crisis, which manifests itself particularly in shrunk foreign demand for local exports. Lower production thus requires considerably fewer workers compared to times of economic boom in 2006-7.

In this context, the proposal of trade unions for increasing the statutory minimum wage by 8.1%, when consumer inflation approaches zero, must be regarded as irresponsible. Considerably increasing the minimum wage in times when many companies operate without any profits could endanger thousands more jobs in the economy.