Unemployment in Israel continues falling

The rate of unemployment in Israel fell to 4.1% in December from 4.6% in November, the Central Bureau of Statistics reports, as the economy continued to recover from the Covid crisis.

Broad unemployment (including people who stopped working at the start of the Covid crisis in March 2020) also fell from 6.5% in November to 6% in December. There are 262,000 people currently not participating in the work force, due to reasons related to the Covid pandemic. Broad unemployment beat the Bank of Israel’s forecast in 2020 of 6.7% at the end of 2021.

On the negative side, the percentage of Israelis participating in the workforce fell slightly from 60.2% in November to 60.1% in December.

Alongside the continuing fall in the unemployment rate, there is a continuing rise in the number of job vacancies, with salaries also on the rise.

But all these figures relate to the pre-Omicron era and the ‘soft’ lockdown caused by the record number of new Covid cases and the large number of people in isolation. Credit card sales, for example, fell by more than 6.5% in the first half of January and the Bank of Israel estimates that 20 days with high morbidity and large numbers of people in isolation will cost the economy NIS 2.5 billion.

Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on January 17, 2022.

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