Belgian employment rate is lagging further behind

Of all European countries with a low employment rate, the evolution towards more workers in Belgium is the smallest. The gap with the European average and the neighboring countries of the Netherlands and Germany is increasing.

The employment rate in our country has increased less sharply in recent years than in most European countries. Belgian progress is poor, especially compared to countries that already score below the European Union average. This is evident from an analysis by De Tijd based on new European figures.

The growth in the number of jobs in our country is a trump card that the federal government parties are happy to use in the run-up to the elections. According to Prime Minister Alexander De Croo (Open VLD), around 300,000 new jobs will have been created this legislature. Yet these additional jobs do not sufficiently boost the employment rate in our country.

That figure expresses how many people of working age – between 20 and 64 years – are actually working. Between 2019 and 2023, the employment rate in our country increased from 70.5 to 72.1 percent, good for an increase of 1.6 percentage points. In the same period, the European average increased by 2.7 percentage points to 75.3 percent. Compared to four years earlier, the gap compared to the average in Europe has therefore grown.

As in 2019, the employment rate is lower than ours in five Member States: in Croatia, Spain, Romania, Greece and Italy. Italy, with barely 66 percent, replaced Greece as the last runner-up. France did and is doing slightly better than our country, but also remains below the EU average.

It is striking that all countries with such a low employment rate have improved more than Belgium. In France, Spain and Italy, the employment rate rose by 2.1 to 2.8 percentage points. In Romania and Croatia this amounts to growth of 3.6 and 4 percentage points respectively and in Greece even 6 percentage points.

Or take Poland. That country kept pace with Belgium in 2019, with 70.5 percent working, but has since increased to 77.9 percent. This means that Poles now tower above the EU average.

If we include all Member States in the comparison, the increase in the employment rate is smaller in only nine countries than in Belgium. But in all those countries the room for improvement was considerably smaller: in 2019, at least 75 percent of 20 to 64-year-olds were already working there. In the Czech Republic, Estonia and Sweden, the employment rate was already above 80 percent.

Today, seven countries in the EU have reached the 80 percent mark. Germany, Hungary and Malta have also completed that milestone. The Netherlands is the first: 83.5 percent of people of working age work there.

Both the Flemish and federal governments aim for an employment rate of 80 percent. For Flanders, this ambition seems feasible by 2030, if the current growth rate continues, Professor Sarah Vansteenkiste of the Work Support Center at KU Leuven recently indicated. However, for the Brussels and Walloon Regions, an employment rate of 80 percent is unrealistic for the time being.

Flanders reached 76.8 percent in 2023, nicely above the European average. Brussels and Wallonia, on the other hand, remain far behind with 66.5 and 65.5 percent. However, these two regions have experienced a very different evolution in recent years: while the Brussels employment rate increased by 4.8 percentage points compared to 2019, growth in Wallonia was limited to barely 0.9 percentage points. The poor Walloon figures in particular slow down Belgian growth.