The document, entitled "Western Balkans Labor Market Trends 2017", was released by the World Bank Office in Sarajevo on Tuesday. It says that the creation of 300,000 jobs increased employment by six percent overall.
"This is good news, but the rate of increase needs to accelerate in order to have a more significant impact on high unemployment and wide-spread inactivity," the report says.
The report is made possible by the first-ever database to provide easily-accessible regional labor market data for the Western Balkans. It allows, for the first time, to calculate aggregate labor market indicators across the six Western Balkan countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia) and to directly compare the six Western Balkan countries with each other and with select EU comparator countries.
"The new report finds that unemployment in the region decreased but remains too high at 21 percent of the labor force. The rate of unemployment assesses the number of people who want to work and are actively seeking jobs, while inactivity is a broader measure of people who are economically inactive for a range of reasons. Forty percent of the working age population remain inactive – a much higher rate than in EU peer countries, with inactivity being particularly high among women and the less-educated.
"According to the report, the recent employment recovery has surprisingly benefited older workers. This is partially explained by demographics, as the number of workers in the 55-64-year-old group is growing strongly overall. Employment in this group increased by more than 20 percent in most countries. The employment recovery also favored the highly-educated," the report said.
One of the conclusions is that the education level is increasingly important for getting a job. Those that did not benefit from modest job recovery are the low-skilled and, especially, less-educated youth.
"Youth unemployment fell from 50 percent in 2014 to 48 percent in 2015. Initial data for 2016 point to a continuing decline, but joblessness among youth remains high compared to 17.3 percent in the European Union," the report said.