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Emigration: much less people work in Hungary than thought?
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Undoubtedly, vast emigration might have already redrawn Hungary’s labour map. Thus, official data on the labour market are probably distorted, because more and more people live and work abroad. However, Hungarian Central Statistical Office (HCSO) does not have data on their exact number – according to portfolio.hu. Thus, it might happen that consumption grows because of money transferred home and not because of the slowly but constantly increasing incomes. According to biggest opposition party Jobbik, wage union might be a solution for both emigration and its worst effect on the economy: labour shortage.
Number of jobless: considerable distort?
As we reported, emigration has a bad effect on all sectors of the Hungarian national economy. The most affected ones are public transport and service, tourism and IT, but health care or education is suffering, as well. In fact, people who could work for these companies are already abroad because of the higher salaries. Thus, there might be a considerable distort regarding the number of people having a job, since many of them might not work in Hungary but in Western-European countries. To put it in another way, they are surely not unemployed, but the reason they have a job is not the Hungarian economic development.
Emigration: nobody knows exactly how many Hungarians work abroad, since most of them are omitted from statistics.According to a study published by Edmond Hosszú and Balázs Romhányi, HCSO’s surveying method operates with considerable errors. This is because
people, who move to work abroad temporarily disappear from the statistics.
At present, HCSO uses the following method. At first, officers ask residents of 30,000 households whether they worked in the last week. Secondly, this is supplemented by data coming from companies. However, difference between numbers coming from the two sources has been growing for years. To put it in another way,
the falling number of unemployed people is invisible in institutional statistics.
Emigrants omitted from state surveys
According to the paper, main problem is not calculating with the total number of the country’s inhabitants. This is because between two censuses HCSO measures only those households where somebody opened the door. Therefore,
those people who work abroad and are not at home are omitted from the surveys.
