Unemployment falls, the number of self-employed goes up in July

The trend of decreasing unemployment in Slovakia is continuing, with the number of jobless people going down since the beginning of 2013, announced Labour, Social Affairs and Family Minister Jan Richter on Wednesday. The unemployment rate in Slovakia stood at 11.46 percent in July, which was a drop of 1.21 percentage points year-on-year. The number of jobseekers immediately able to take up a job amounted to a little over 309,000 in July, which was a decrease of more than 30 000 on the year. While unemployment dropped in July the number of živnostníks, or self-employed people in this period rose significantly. "For us it's important that a person is working. In this case it's not important whether as an employee or self-employed", said Minister Richter adding that the drop in unemployment has been continuous since January 2013, for two-and-a-half years now. And all the prerequisites - concerning economic development and GDP growth - for this trend to continue have been produced, said Minister Richter adding that the Government has a goal of reaching the eurozone average unemployment rate of 11.1 percent by the end of the year. Richter also takes a positive view of the fact that the number of jobless people is decreasing in all disadvantaged groups, including youth, people over 50 and the long-term unemployed. Prime Minister Robert Fico met with 140 representatives of districts with high unemployment. One of the measures to help them should be basic automatic mechanisms to support employment. Fico said they could be launched the moment when the district achieves the unemployment limit which, at the moment it is 20 percent. His government promised to help districts with the highest unemployment this May, in a special program.