The trends at the end of the summer season, which we send off with the traditional shortage, are contradictory. There are probably at least 20,000 – 30,000 open jobs left until the end, we entered the season with 70,000. There is already officially a slight increase in unemployment, which I expect to increase in the next month or two with both the end of the season and some optimizations that are going on in the sphere of outsourcing and in some production areas, wage growth continues. This is what Georgi Parvanov from the Bulgarian Employment Confederation said about the program “Bulgaria, Europe and the world in focus” on Radio “Focus”.
Is rising unemployment a concern?
“For now, it is rather within some controllable framework, as long as we do not reach any higher levels,” commented the expert.
“It’s more typical for this period. And in previous years we’ve seen the same thing. We also have about 9,000-10,000 drop in open jobs in the leading sites. It was the same situation last year and the year before. We’ll see later in September-October, whether the market will recover quickly, as it has been so far in previous years”, he also commented.
Wages in most sectors continue to rise, explained Georgi Parvanov.
“Since the beginning of the year, they are up over 16%, well above expectations, inflation continues to be high. The large increase in wages in Sofia city and region is impressive, a very large increase – over 20% in wages in municipal and state companies. In the rest sectors are also undergoing traditional developments. There is only hesitation and a slight hold in the financial sector, which is related to consolidations. There, you know, there have been mergers of large banks and there are probably at least 1-2 more such deals to come later this year or next.” he added.
Apart from Sofia, a fairly high average salary is reported in the regions of Plovdiv, Varna and Vratsa. The lowest average salaries were recorded in the Blagoevgrad region.
“Our impressions are that Sofia has much higher salaries, unfortunately, compared to the country, the difference according to official statistics is 35-36%, which is not normal, and hopefully this thing will change and we will also have high salaries in the whole country. And after that, with a not too big margin, or at least to catch up with Sofia and Plovdiv,” said Georgi Parvanov.
“It was a surprise to me that the Vratsa region has higher pay levels than Plovdiv,” the expert noted.
“This statistic is related to certain larger productions and energy ones, and specifically the Kozloduy NPP, which greatly boosts the entire region. When you have a smaller population – 1-2 larger structuring enterprises can pull all the stats up.
This is always the case every year with the municipality with the highest salaries – Chelopech, where they chase 2000 euro average salary“, he also said.
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