Bulgaria has lowest percentage of part-time employment in EU – official
Part-time employment accounted for 2.2 per cent of all employment in Bulgaria in 2017, the lowest such percentage in the EU, according to figures released on June 8 by EU statistics agency Eurostat.
At the same time, Bulgaria had among the highest percentages of what is called “involuntary part-time work” in the EU, at 58.7 per cent. The term means people who would like full-time work but have only part-time work.
Eurostat said that about 43 million people aged 15 to 64 in the European Union (EU) worked part-time in 2017. This represents one in five (19.4 per cent) people having a job in the EU. Part-time employment as a percentage of total employment has fluctuated between 15.6 per cent and 19.6 per cent over the last 15 years in the EU.
In 2017, this proportion was still much higher for women (31.7 per cent) than for men (8.8 per cent). It was also slightly higher in the euro area (21.6 per cent) than in the EU (19.4 per cent).
Across the EU member states, part-time employment was by far the most common in the Netherlands, with half (49.8 per cent) of all employed people aged 15 to 64 working part-time in 2017.
After the Netherlands, about one in four employed people worked part-time in Austria (27.9 per cent), Germany (26.9 per cent), Denmark (25.3 per cent), the United Kingdom (24.9), Belgium (24.5 per cent) and Sweden (23.3 per cent).
At the opposite end of the scale, part-time employment accounted for less than five per cent of all employment in Bulgaria (2.2 per cent), Hungary (4.3 per cent) and Croatia (4.8 per cent).
Low shares were also recorded in Slovakia (5.8 per cent), the Czech Republic (6.2 per cent), Poland (6.6 per cent), Romania (6.8 per cent), Lithuania (7.6 per cent) and Latvia (7.7 per cent).
Among those people in the EU employed part-time in 2017, over a quarter (26.4 per cent) did not actively choose this working pattern.
The highest shares of involuntary part-time work across the EU were recorded in Greece (70.2 per cent of people employed part-time) and Cyprus (67.4 per cent), followed by Italy (62.5 per cent), Spain (61.1 per cent), Bulgaria (58.7 per cent), Romania (55.8 per cent), Portugal (47.5 per cent) and France (43.1 per cent).
In contrast, involuntary part time represented less than 10 per cent of total part-time employment in Estonia (7.5 per cent), Belgium (7.8 per cent), the Netherlands (8.2 per cent), the Czech Republic (9.1 per cent) and Malta (9.6 per cent), Eurostat said.
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