WARSAW: Poland’s jobless rate fell to its lowest since late 2008 in May, data showed on Monday, partly reflecting a trend by multinational companies to establish offshoring centres in the European Union’s largest eastern economy. The registered unemployment rate fell to 9.2 percent from 9.5 percent in April, the labour ministry said.
“Another month of single-digit unemployment and an improving situation on the labour market are clear signals that we are starting to deal with an employee’s market,” Labour Minister Elzbieta Rafalska said in a statement. She said the rate was likely to fall below 9 percent by year-end. The lowest rate of unemployment in Poland since the end of communist rule in 1989 was 8.8 percent, recorded in October 2008.
The fall in unemployment has been mirrored by rising wages, with employees benefiting from a rapid expansion of offshoring by corporations such as Credit Suisse and Amazon. Corporate wages rose by a nominal 4.6 percent last month. Accounting for deflation, they are currently rising at a rate of well over 5 percent per year. Despite the increases, Poles on average earn less than a third as much as Germans.
“With such a labour market one may expect that wage dynamics will accelerate,” said Grzegorz Maliszewski, chief economist at Bank Millennium in Warsaw. “The data support a scenario of stable interest rates in the months ahead. There are prospects for further improvement in domestic demand,” he added.
