From February to April 2019, paid employment amongst 15 t0 74 years old goes up by 11000 people per month on average. Unemployment went down by 10000 per month averagely, and up until now, it has gone down by 300,000. 

However, 4.1 million people could not get paid for whatever reasons. Besides unemployed people, there are about 3.8 million people search for jobs or without jobs. For the past 3 months, this group of people has increased by 7,000 per month.

Unemployment indicator

To compare the cyclical movements in labor markets between countries, analysts usually adopt ILO indicators designed by an international labor organization. 

According to this indicator, the unemployed include all those who are jobless but actively paid work and will be employed soon between 15 years old and 74 years old. In April, 300,000 are unemployed, which constitutes 3,3% of the entire labor force. In 2018, this ratio was 3,5%, which is lower than the historical lowest before the crisis. 

By the end of April, UWV has paid out 257,000 times of unemployment benefits. This has been going down continuously for 3 months, and this is lower than March by 4%, April last year by 18%. This January, the number of people who received unemployment benefits went up a bit, but still lower than that in 2018. At the end of 2018, there were 263000 people who received unemployment benefits. 

Seasons have an influence on unemployment benefits

Employment in construction and agriculture and other industries that are sensitive to seasonal changes would increase after the winter. Therefore, compared to last month, WW beneficiaries went down by 11% in agriculture and 7% in construction. In the meanwhile, temporary workers’ welfare went down by 9%.

Netherlands ranked the third in EU

In March, the unemployment rate stabilized at 3.3%, which is amongst the lowest three in the EU. Besides the Netherlands, both Czech and Germany have low employment rates. Spain and Greece have the highest unemployment rate, which is 14% and 18.5% respectively. In the Netherlands, the unemployment rate peaked at the beginning of 2014. In March that year, it went up to 7.8%, which ranked 10th in the EU.