Tapping the economically inactive pool
Today’s landscape in the Greek labor market is dominated by reduced employment and pay gaps for women, negative distinctions in the share of working youth and people over the age of 55, as well as very low labor productivity rates.
The indicators deteriorated dramatically during the multi-year crisis, but despite the recovery of the last few years the gap with the rest of the European countries remains chaotic. The government is concerned about that gap and hopes that if Greece catches the European Union average rates on a number of key indicators (employment of young people, women, pensioners etc) it is possible to increase the total income of the country by adding even 400,000 people to the active labor market.
Employment figures show that even today, with unemployment down to 10% – i.e. quite close to pre-crisis levels – there are 400,000 fewer employed people than in 2009 (the employed number 4.2 million today, from 3.8 million in 2018, but also against 4.6 million in 2008). Therefore, in order to expand the labor market, the government aspires to bring in some of the over 3 million economically inactive people.
