The Employment Agency reported a 6.7 per cent registered jobless rate in July, down by 0.1 percentage points on June and 1.5 percentage points on a year earlier.

The registered unemployed people numbered 220,884. They were 3,283 fewer (1.5 per cent) than in June, and 47,216 fewer (17.6 per cent) than a year earlier.

A total of 18,300 unemployed people found jobs in July, including 16,028 on the primary labour market. Subsidized jobs were taken by 2,272 people, of whom 573 started work under programmes and measures envisaged in the Employment Promotion Act, and 1,699 landed jobs under Operational Programme Human Resources Development.

A total of 15,698 vacancies were registered on the primary labour market, including 60.3 per cent in the private sector. Their total number was up 2.9 per cent (440 jobs) from a year earlier.

Vacancies on the primary labour market were most numerous in the manufacturing industries (4,933), followed by trade (2,600), administrative and auxiliary services (1,638), education (1,310), construction (963), the hospitality industry (817), transport, storage and postal services (582), agriculture, forestry and fisheries (491), and real estate (432).

A breakdown by occupation shows that employers using the services of job centres wanted to hire mainly teachers, shop assistants, workers in the manufacturing industries, stationary machine operators, skilled workers in the food, apparel and woodworking industries, unskilled waste collection workers, drivers and assemblers.