Although the number of unemployment benefits is historically low, the number of inactive people in Belgium remains very high compared to the rest of Europe, said Thursday Michiel Segaert of the Onem research department, co-author of a new study .
The study notes that when allowances for young people leaving school were limited in time, an exodus towards integration income and disability was noted. However, these are regimes from which the flow to work is often even more difficult, explains Onem.
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Mr. Segaert says that around 550,000 additional people need to work for the employment rate to be 80%. “It is much more than the number of beneficiaries who still have unemployment,” he continues.
The specialist explains that these allowances represent less than 3% of social security and that this “no longer offers fundamental budgetary margin.”
Onem also emphasizes that the greatest structural improvement in terms of unemployment over the last twenty years has been observed in Wallonia. Structural declines were also observed in Brussels, in a “big city context”.
In Flanders, more schemes are related to professional inactivity such as unemployment with company supplement (RCC) or time credit. The increase in the number of jobs in the north of the country explains in particular the increase in career interruption schemes in the region. “This improves the balance between work and private life, but at the same time it contributes to reducing the volume of employment and increasing the volume of inactivity,” emphasizes Michiel Segaert.
Brussels has more and more job seekers, but fewer and fewer people benefit from unemployment
The study also points out that men are over-represented in unemployment schemes, while women are more present in part-time work schemes. The average Onem allowance for women is lower than that for men, partly because of the differences in salaries which serve as a basis for calculating the allowance, specifies the office.
