Statbel publishes today the labour market transitions between the second quarter of 2022 and the second quarter of 2023. These results show that people still stay in employment easily, but inactive people often remain inactive. Among inactive people, women, low-skilled people and people with a foreign nationality remain more often inactive. Moreover, the share of people leaving unemployment to work has slightly increased: 28.9% of the unemployed in the second quarter 2022 are employed a year later. A quarter earlier, this percentage was 24.2%.
Employed
A very high percentage of people who were employed a year ago are still working today. 94.5% of employed people who were employed in the second quarter of 2022 are still employed in the second quarter of 2023. In addition, 1.6% of employed people have become unemployed a year later and 3.9% are inactive. These figures remained fairly stable compared to the previous quarter.
Unemployed
In the previous quarters, it was noticeable that unemployed people seemed to find it more difficult to make the transition to work. This percentage has slightly increased compared to the previous quarter. 28.9% of the unemployed in the second quarter 2022 are employed a year later. A quarter earlier, this percentage was 24.2%.
44.4% of the unemployed in the second quarter 2022 seem to still be unemployed a year later, compared to 50.5% in the period between the first quarter 2022 and the first quarter 2023. Of the 294,000 unemployed people in the second quarter of 2022, 131,000 are still unemployed one year later, 85,000 are working and 79,000 have become inactive.
We see large regional differences: of the Flemish unemployed in the second quarter 2022, 31.1% are still unemployed one year later. Figures are higher in the Brussels-Capital Region and in the Walloon Region: the percentage of people remaining unemployed over a 1-year period stands at 53.0% in the Brussels-Capital Region and at 49.7% in the Walloon Region.
Inactive
The vast majority of inactive people are still inactive one year later. Of the 3.4 million people who were inactive in the second quarter 2022, 91.8% or 3.1 million are still inactive one year later, a figure remarkably higher than in the previous quarter. In the previous quarters, this percentage was always below the 90%. These are mainly young people aged 15 to 24 (830,000), the vast majority of whom are still studying, and 1.7 million of people over 55. 6.0% or 204,000 people have started to work and a small percentage of 2.2% or 76,000 have made the transition to unemployment according to ILO definitions. This means that these people are now seeking work and are also available for a job, whereas this was not the case a year earlier.
If we look at the age groups that have remained the most inactive on average over the last few years (2017-present), we see that in the 15-24 age group, 87.3% of inactive people are still inactive a year later, but this is mainly due to the fact that most inactive young people are still studying and not working. This percentage then decreases in the 25-34 age group (67.8%) and then rises systematically in the 35-44 age group (74.6%), the 45-54 age group (84.2%), the 55-64 age group (88.8%) and the 65+ age group (98.4%). So, from the age of 55 onwards, more than 90% remain inactive after one year.
Looking further at the 25-54 age group (2017 to present), the following groups are more likely to remain inactive one year later: women, people from the Brussels-Capital Region and the Walloon Region, low-skilled people and people of foreign nationality. We can see that men and women have roughly equal shares in the population, but women are over-represented (68%) in the group of people remaining inactive. We also see regional differences: residents of the Walloon region account for 31.2% of the population in Belgium, but 40.7% of the inactive between 25 and 54. On the other hand, residents of the Flemish Region account for 56.5% of the population, but 42% of the inactive. In the Brussels-Capital Region, these figures are 12.3% and 17.3% respectively. We also see large differences according to the level of education: low-skilled people account for 16.3% of the population, but 43.6% of the inactive. So, low-skilled people are three times more likely to be inactive than their share of the population. For highly-skilled people, this ratio is less than half. Among people with a foreign nationality (who account for 15% of the population), 27.2% are inactive. That means they are almost twice as likely to be inactive. In total, this is about 580,000 inactive people aged 25 to 54.
Background information
To assess the situation of the labour market, it is not only important to know how many people are unemployed, inactive and employed, but also how many people change their status within a given period of time. How many of the unemployed in this quarter were also looking for work a year earlier? How many of them have gone into work? What percentage of working people were also working a year earlier? Questions that can be answered with the Labour Force Survey, as this is a survey in which respondents are questioned several times.
In this press release, we discuss the evolution of the labour market status of people who were employed, unemployed or inactive one year ago (second quarter of 2022) and compare it with their status in the current quarter (second quarter of 2023). We focus here on the population aged 15 to 74. We also publish the comparison between the status in the previous quarter (fourth quarter of 2022) and the status in the current quarter (second quarter of 2023). These figures are not discussed in this text, but can be found under Figures on the website.