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bne July 2020 Central Europe I 37
relying on grandparents. “[T]his option is nevertheless no longer available due to the restrictions of the lockdowns.
If we consider that the lockdown experience might have exacerbated
the traditional division of gender roles, the negative returns on fertility can be expected especially in countries where the gap in the amount of paid and unpaid work done by women and men was high in the pre-crisis period, such as in Italy and Spain.”
Eurostat data on the employment and gender pay gaps across the European Union don’t reveal any particular divide between the “old” EU member states and the newer states from Central and Southeast Europe that joined from 2004 onwards.
The gender gap, defined as the difference between the employment rates of men and women of working age (20-64), was 11.8 pp across the EU-27 in 2018, and it varied significantly across member states. The lowest gaps were reported in four Baltic and Scandinavian states: Lithuania (2.3 pp), Finland (3.7 pp), Latvia and Sweden (both 4.2pp).
On the other hand, three countries
from Central and Southeast Europe – Czechia (15.2 pp), Hungary (15.3 pp) and Romania (18.3 pp) – had some of the largest gender gaps in the EU, but not as big as southern European states Italy (19.8 pp), Greece (21.0 pp), Malta (21.9 pp) or EU candidate country North Macedonia. This is due to the lower participation of women in the labour markets in these countries, Eurostat said.
Meanwhile, the gender pay gap – the difference between the average gross hourly earnings of men and women expressed as a percentage of average gross hourly earnings of men – is highest in Estonia at 22.7% but lowest in Romania at 3.0%. There were more Central and Southeast European states among the EU members with both the highest and with the lowest gender pay gaps.
While there most likely will be no baby boom as a result of the lockdowns, what we have seen on a very large scale is the return of migrants both from within the
region and further afield, mostly western Europe. The pandemic has thus achieved what governments across the region have been trying and largely failing to do for years – bring home their migrants.
In CEE in particular labour markets became very tight in the last few years
– to the extent that countries such as Poland were having to bring people
in from Ukraine to fill vacancies. Governments have been trying to persuade people to come back, and several initiatives were launched to achieve this, not just to swell the labour force, but to bring back hard-working young people with useful skills and understanding of new working practices, new languages and so on.
Their return during the pandemic came at a cost, as many of the early cases in emerging Europe are believed to have originated from people who returned from northern Italy, seeding the virus in multiple places in their home countries.
The question now is how long will
they stay? It’s early days yet, as travel restrictions are only now being relaxed, and there are concerns about a second wave later this year. Borders are only just
jobs, and employers are looking to local workers to fill them.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said on June 22 that the government should present 100 new projects in the construction sector to employ Armenians who would normally be working in other Eurasian Economic Union countries. "Our main plan is to try to create jobs for our citizens in Armenia so that they will have a chance to work here, rather than outside Armenia," Pashinian said as quoted by Armenpress.
However, even at the height of the pandemic in Europe employers in
some West European countries were desperately trying to find ways to
bring back their seasonal workers. 150 Romanians were flown to the UK on a chartered plan to pick strawberries in April, as farmers didn’t find local workers with the skills or inclination to do the work. Germany is another country where there were fears crops would rot in the fields without seasonal workers from countries like Romania and Bulgaria. On June 11, the German government relaxed entry restrictions for seasonal farm workers from EU countries that it had imposed during the crisis.
“The pandemic has achieved what governments across the region have been trying and largely failing to do for years – bring home their migrants”
starting to reopen. Moreover, many jobs in sectors such as tourism are likely to be lost as well as others as countries were plunged into a deep recession by the pandemic.
For now, companies in some countries are looking to fill vacancies created by the absence of seasonal workers from abroad with local people left jobless by the crisis. Croatia, for example, relies on imported labour in particular from neighbouring Bosnia & Herzegovina for the tourism and construction sectors, and employers have been constantly pushing for increases in foreign worker quotas. This year there will be fewer
The pandemic temporarily reversed the flow of migration and brought workers back home. But as economists from
the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw) pointed out back in March, economic contractions brought on by health crises tend to
be shorter-lived and followed by a stronger rebound than those caused by financial crises. It may take some time for economies to bounce back post pandemic – and will depend on how long it takes to find a vaccine – but when they do, the factors drawing workers away from emerging Europe to other countries will most likely be restored.
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