Dutch job vacancy growth slows

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Dutch job vacancy growth slows

Expatica.com
March 3, 2005

AMSTERDAM — The number of job vacancies rose slightly in the last quarter of 2004, but the pace of growth is slowing compared to the boom times in 2000.

There were 128,000 recorded job vacancies at the end of December last year, the central statistics agency CBS said on Thursday. This was 2,000 higher than the previous quarter.

There were a record number 213,000 situations vacant in the Netherlands back at the end of 2000.

The affects of the bursting of the internet bubble in March 2000, the blow dealt to the world economy by the 11 September terror attacks in 2001 and the general worsening of business optimism cut this number sharply in subsequent years.

The number of vacancies in the Netherlands declined to 92,000 by the end of September 2003, before rising again for five quarters in a row up to the end of 2004.

The average rise during this period was 7,000 per quarter, with a slowing of the pace setting in during the third and fourth quarters of 2004, the CBS said.

The commercial services sector has seen the largest increase in available jobs. By the end of 2004, there were 74,000 vacancies in this sector, 3,000 higher than the previous three months.

This increase was not matched by the situation in the industrial, non-commercial services and agricultural sectors, where the number of vacancies hardly grew at all.

But the CBS said the fourth quarter of 2004, as was the case in the second and third quarters, displaced a "great dynamism on the job market" in comparison with the year earlier.

There were 176,000 open vacancies by the end of 2004, 24,000 more than the same period in 2003. The number of filled vacancies came to 165,000 in the last quarter of 2004, 26,000 more than the previous year.

The CBS said the tension in the jobs market was assessed by looking at the number of open vacancies per thousand jobs. By the last quarter of 2004 there were 18 unfilled vacancies per thousand jobs, four more than the year earlier.

Meanwhile, the CBS has also reported that the growth in unemployment among people of a "non-western" background in the Netherlands is also slowing down.

Unemployment among people with a non-western background increased to 16 percent in 2004, compared with 14 percent in 2003. Nevertheless, the CBS said the rate of unemployment growth among foreigners is now slowing down.

Unemployment among the indigenous population grew from 4.2 percent in 2003 to 5.2 percent in 2004. "Unemployment has not been this high since 1997. Unemployment among Moroccans in particular rose dramatically," the CBS said.

Figures by the CBS show that the rate of registered unemployed among "western foreigners" is rising and is currently running at 8 percent, compared to slightly over 5 percent for native Dutch.

Back in 1996, about 10 percent of the "western" foreigner population was registered as jobless and this figure fell steadily to just under 5 percent by 2001. The rate then climbed slowly to its current level, at least two points shy of the 10 percent recorded eight years ago.



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