German Unemployment Remains Stable Over March

Thursday 31st March 2022 – 09:15 (BST)

German unemployment continued its push back towards pre-pandemic levels despite growing concerns over the impact of the Ukraine conflict. Figures released by the German Statistics Office showed the overall unemployment rate held steady at 5% during March as Europe’s largest economy continues to feel the benefit of relaxed coronavirus restrictions.

This represents a 18,000 person decline in seasonally adjusted numbers, which was slightly below the 20,000 person fall anticipated but moves levels further away from their peak in April 2020.

Utilisation of the government financed short-time work program also declined, with around 600,000 German employees still receiving this state aid in January 2022. For comparison, at the height of the pandemic that figure stood at just below 6,000,000.

Todays numbers will have also been watched closely by policymakers at the European Central Bank – looking out for signs that a tighter labour market could lead to more sustained inflation. The concern is lower joblessness increases wage demands which in turn supports price rises across the economy.

Energy prices continue to add inflationary pressure with comments from German economic and energy minister Robert Habeck predicting “mass unemployment, poverty, people who can’t heat their homes, people who run out of petrol” if the country stopped utilising Russian oil and gas.

Few other western economies are as dependent on Russian energy as Germany: 55% of the natural gas, 52% of the coal and 34% of mineral oil used in the country comes from Russia, for which it pays hundreds of millions of euros daily.