Belgian employment rate is growing slower than neighboring countries

New figures from Eurostat show that the employment rate in Belgium has grown very little over the past four years. The country remains below the European average.

In the news: From an analysis of the figures that The time made, it appears that Belgium has difficulty increasing the employment rate.

• The employment rate, the share of people of working age (between 20 and 64 years) who are actually working, was 72.1 percent in Belgium in 2023. In 2019 this was 70.5 percent, an increase of 1.6 percentage points.
• And that is a lot less than the European average: with an increase of 2.7 percentage points, the average employment rate will have risen to 75.3 percent in 2023.
• In countries where the employment rate is also low, such as Italy (66.3 percent), but also Spain (70.5 percent) or France (74.4 percent), it has increased more and more compared to 2019, each time between 2.1 and 2.8 percentage points.
• And in the nine countries where the employment rate rose less quickly than in Belgium, it was already above 75 percent in 2019. So there was less room for improvement.

Wallonia and Brussels are lagging behind

Zoomed in: Achieving an employment rate of 80 percent remains difficult for the entire country.

• The Belgian government has set a target for the country to achieve an employment rate of 80 percent by 2030. There are currently seven EU countries that are already there, with the Netherlands in the lead. 83.5 of the active population work there.
• According to Sarah Vansteenkiste of the Work Support Center at KU Leuven, it is possible that Flanders will achieve that target: with an employment rate of 76.6 percent, it is above the European average.
• It is Brussels (with an employment rate of 66.5 percent) and Wallonia (65.5 percent) that drag down the Belgian figure. What is particularly striking is that Brussels is getting the numbers up, with an increase of 4.8 percentage points compared to 2019. In Wallonia this is barely possible, with a growth of only 0.9 percentage points.