The corona crisis has raised unemployment in Austria to record levels

The pandemic of the new coronavirus caused an unprecedented crisis in the Austrian labor market. The average unemployment rate in Austria in 2020 rose by 2.6 percentage points to 9.9 percent. This was the most since the beginning of recording these data in 1946. 467,000 people were out of work, which was 103,000 more than in 2019. An even more significant deterioration of the situation was prevented by the emergency corona program for employment protection, the so-called kurzarbeit, under which 6.1 billion euros have been paid so far. At the end of January, 535,000 people were out of work in Austria and the unemployment rate was 11.4 percent. At present, there are still 465 thousand people on the exchange rate, at the peak of the crisis in May 2020 it was up to 1.3 million. The current kurzarbeit program will last until the end of June. According to experts, the situation on the labor market will depend primarily on the development of the pandemic of the new coronavirus. The economist of the Austrian Wifo Institute, Helmut Mahringer, warned that once the pandemic was overcome, its negative consequences would not automatically disappear. In its autumn forecast published last October, Wifo expected the unemployment rate to return to pre-corona crisis levels by 2025 at the earliest.