Director of the Republic Bureau of Statistics (RGZ) Miladin Kovacevic said today that the reduction in the number of employees at the beginning of the year is not unusual, nor is the number of employees, according to the records of the Central Register of Compulsory Social Insurance, reduced due to the pandemic.
In a statement submitted to the Beta agency, Kovacevic reacted to the assessment of the associate of the Center for Democracy Foundation, Sarita Bradas, that the number of employees in Serbia decreased by 60,800 in the first quarter.
In a statement to Beta yesterday, Bradas stated that the decrease in total employment of 60,800 (of which 51,400 in the informal sector) in the first quarter of 2020 compared to the fourth quarter of 2019 “cannot be interpreted as seasonal oscillations because they have not been so large “.
Kovacevic claims that “the situation was almost the same at the turn of 2016 in 2017 and 2017 in 2018, when total employment fell by over 70,000 at the beginning of the year, only to return later in the year to the upward trajectory started in 2014.”
According to Kovacevic, the survey on registered employment, conducted by the SBS on the basis of data from the Central Register of Compulsory Social Insurance and the Statistical Business Register, showed that there were 2,199,538 employees in Serbia on May 29, 2020, which is 10,154 more in relation to the situation on February 27, 2020 (the last available data before the introduction of the state of emergency).
“The number of employees increased by 15,614 (employment with legal entities increased by 16,282, while the number of private entrepreneurs and their employees decreased by 668), the number of employees outside employment (temporary and occasional jobs and employment contracts) decreased is by 4,080, and the number of registered individual farmers has been reduced by 1,380,” stated Kovacevic, Novi Magazin reports.
