Decline in Employment and Rise in Unemployment Continued in April. New WIFO Research Brief Analyses Austrian Labour Market in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Julia Bock-Schappelwein; Ulrike Huemer; Helmut Mahringer

19.05.2020

Decline in Employment and Rise in Unemployment Continued in April

New WIFO Research Brief Analyses Austrian Labour Market in the COVID-19 Pandemic

The massive decline in employment that began in mid-March 2020 as a result of the measures taken by the Government to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic continued in April. A new WIFO Research Brief by Julia Bock-Schappelwein, Rainer Eppel, Ulrike Huemer, Walter Hyll and Helmut Mahringer analyses Austria's labour market in the corona crisis.

Compared to April 2019, the number of employees fell by 188,905 to 3,582,751 (–5.0 percent). After the record unemployment rate in March 2020, unemployment continued to rise until mid-April, before coming to a halt in the second half of the month. At the end of April, 571,477 unemployed persons and persons in training measures were registered with the Public Employment Service Austria (AMS), 8,955 (+1.6 percent) more than in March 2020 and 210,275 (+58.2 percent) more than in April 2019, respectively. While the number of training participations fell by 24.2 percent due to the discontinuation of training practices, the number of persons registered as unemployed increased by 76.3 percent in April.