Belgium is one of the European countries which is struggling to fill job vacancies the most, the latest figures from the European statistics office Eurostat showed.
The country's tight labour market has been a problem for some time. Data from June 2022 last year showed Belgium had the third highest number of vacancies in the European Union, which was largely put down to increasing demand for personnel as a result of the fast economic recovery after the Covid-19 pandemic.
However, since then, the situation has only deteriorated. In the second quarter of this year, companies in Belgium continued to struggle to fill vacancies – more so than in other Member States.
"Among the Member States for which comparable data are available, the highest job vacancy rates in the second quarter of 2023 were recorded in the Netherlands (4.7%), Belgium (4.6%) and Austria (4.4%)," Eurostat noted. The higher the vacancy rate, the more companies are struggling to find suitable candidates for a vacancy.
Chronic problem
While the latest vacancy rate of 4.6% is lower than that recorded in the first quarter of 2022 (when it averaged 4.8%), Belgium is still far above the EU average of 2.7%, and above the eurozone average of 3%.
Data from before the pandemic shows that Belgium's job vacancy rate was slightly lower than it is now (3.4% in December 2019), but even then, Belgium had the second-highest job vacancy rate. Since then, the number of vacancies has increased by 1.2 percentage points.
The lowest rates were observed in Bulgaria and Romania (0.8% for both), Spain and Poland (0.9% for both) and Slovakia (1%).
Compared with the same quarter of 2022, the job vacancy rate increased in four Member States, remained stable in four Member States and decreased in 19. In June 2022, it had increased in all 27 Member States.
The high vacancy rate in Europe is most noticeable in the industry and construction sector and in the services sector, including hospitality and tourism.
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According to Belgian figures published by the county's statistics agency Statbel earlier this week, the number of vacancies dropped in the second quarter of 2023. There were 194,957 vacancies at Belgian companies in recent months, compared to 196,922 in the first quarter of 2023.
The vacancy rate – the number of vacancies relative to the total number of jobs in the company – fell from 4.68% to 4.63%, the national agency stated.
