Compared with this time one year ago, 18,000 more people are in employment in Hungary. According to the latest briefing from the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (CSO), between January and March 2011 the average number of those employed in businesses with at least five staff, budgetary institutions, and non-profit organisations surveyed was 2,642,000: 1.18 per cent higher than the figure of 2,611,000 for the same period last year.

The reason for this expansion is growth in the private sector – and manufacturing industry in particular – which now indicates the job-creating effect of economic growth based on industrial exports; but the expansion also comes from the service sector, in which a major role has been played by the introduction of flat-rate income tax, due to which workers have moved to the mainstream economy from the black economy. Average gross monthly earnings for full-time employees also rose by 1.5 per cent this year: to HUF 210,000, from HUF 206,900 in the same period last year.

According to the CSO’s preliminary results, published this morning, the number of employees in the Hungarian economy in March exceeded the level measured in the same month last year by 18,000: 0.7%, which is roughly equivalent to the growth rate of previous months. Within the economy as whole, the private sector has been showing constant growth of 3 per cent (50,000 people) since May 2010, and the main source of this has been manufacturing, where 30,000 (5.5 per cent) more people were employed in March than a year earlier. The dynamic growth in employment in manufacturing indicates that accelerating economic growth – mainly driven by export-producing sectors for the time being – has had a substantial impact on creating new jobs. In the public sphere, however, there has been a slight fall in employment (filtering out the effects of former public works programmes being wound down and new public works campaigns gradually getting under way, in March it stood at an annual 0.7 per cent). Considering the role of the Hungarian public sector in employment – significant in international terms – the redistribution of employment figures between the public and private sectors is a positive sign for the future growth potential of the Hungarian economy.

Employment trends in the economy and in each sector (changes in employment figures compared to the same period last year, in thousands).

In the private sector, the growth in the employment figures numbers came with a 4.6 per cent increase in gross earnings in March – taking favourable income tax changes into account, this means an average 8.5 percent increase in net earnings; taking inflation into account, this is equivalent to a rise of nearly 4 per cent in the purchasing power of earnings. At the same time, average public sector wages fell, but this can be explained by the absence of one-off bonuses last January and March: excluding these bonuses, gross wages also show an increase in the public sector.

(kormany.hu)