Acting Head of the State Employment Service of Ukraine Valeriy Yaroshenko has said that the amount of employed population in Ukraine grew by 0.9% year-over-year.
“We are witnessing that the labor market is actually demonstrating some kind of stabilization for the first half of 2018. The growth in the employment of the population for us, according to the state statistics, occurred for the first time since 2013,” he told a news conference in. According to Yaroshenko, in comparison with the corresponding period of the previous year the number of employed population in Ukraine increased by 149,000 people (by 0.9%), and the unemployment rate is 9.7%.
At the same time, he said that 21.8% of Ukrainians work in the shadows, while last year there were 22.3% of them.
“We have 304,000 people registered with the State Employment Service today,” Yaroshenko said.
According to him, 47% of them have higher education, and in the cities of Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, Sumy and Lviv in employment centers from 85% to 90% of the unemployed people have higher education.
“As of July 27, compared with the same date in 2017, the number of unemployment assistance recipients in the country is 23,000, which is 8% less than it was in 2017,” he said.
In addition, he said that the average amount of assistance payments is growing in the country. Thus, minimum assistance under the law is UAH 544 per month, and 25% of the unemployed receive it, and the maximum is UAH 7,048, and 5% unemployed (last year 3%) receive it.
“The number of vacancies has significantly increased over the past year, we now have about 130,000 vacancies in the database,” the head of the State Employment Service said.
At the same time, he pointed out the existence of a large imbalance in the labor market between the vacancies offered and the demand of applicants.
Yaroshenko said that at the moment the employment market in Ukraine most in need of locksmiths, electric welders, turners, bakers, drivers, salesmen, cooks, waiters, nurses, tractor drivers and agricultural machinery servicemen.
“We for half a year were able to retrain and raise the qualification of 88,000 unemployed,” Yaroshenko said.
Ukraine and Israel seek to boost goods flow in the coming five years to $2 billion a year, while last year the figure grew by 14.7% compared with 2016, reaching $772.5 million, Ukraine’s First Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Economic Development and Trade Stepan Kubiv has said. “I met with Israeli Minister of the Economy and Industry Eli Cohen and agreed to increase the trade flow to $ 2 billion in the next five years,” he wrote on his Facebook page.
According to him, the countries also intend to develop cooperation in the field of innovation and high technologies.
Kubiv also recalled that Ukraine and Israel intend to sign a free trade agreement by the end of this year.
Ukraine in June 2018 increased steel production by 1.5% compared to the same period in 2017, to 1.711 million tonnes, climbing from 12th to 14th in the rating of 64 countries, the world’s major producers of this product, compiled by the World Steel Association (Worldsteel). In June the growth of steel smelting was recorded in the majority of the first ten countries from June 2017, except for Brazil.
The top ten countries producing steel in June are as follows: China (80.196 million tonnes, a rise of 7.5%), Japan (8.76 million tonnes, an increase of 4.2%), India (8.739 million tonnes, an increase of 7.4%), the United States (6.847 million tonnes, a rise of 0.8%), South Korea (6.122 million tonnes, an increase of 3.2%), Russia (6.12 million tonnes, a rise of 8.9%), Germany (3.77 million tonnes, an increase of 2.6%), Turkey (3.043 million tonnes, an increase of 0.7%), Brazil (2.59 million tonnes, a fall of 2.2%), and Italy (2.135 million tonnes, a rise of 1.5%).
They are followed by Iran (2.08 million tonnes, an increase of 16.5% and, Ukraine (1.711 million tonnes, a rise of 1.5%). Overall, 64 countries produced 151.379 million tonnes of steel in June 2018, which is 5.8% more than in June 2017.
In January-June 2018, 64 countries produced 881.455 million tonnes of steel, which is 4.6% more than in January-June 2017.
Ukraine and Serbia are holding talks to launch the Belgrade-Kyiv regular flight, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has said.
“We have started the negotiations… on the launch of a new regular flight between Belgrade and Kyiv,” Vucic said after the talks with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Belgrade on Tuesday.
He said that the launch of the flight would help to establish business and cultural ties between Ukraine and Serbia.
Vucic said that last year over 10,000 tourists from Ukraine visited Serbia.
“We believe that this tourist flow would grow more,” he said.
The Serbian president showed the interest that citizens of Serbia travel to Ukraine.
Minister of Social Policy Andriy Reva has said that more than 3.2 million Ukrainian citizens are employed abroad on a permanent basis. “More than 3.2 million Ukrainian citizens work abroad on a regular basis,” Reva said at the launch of the project to improve the management of the labor market dubbed “Inclusive labor market for jobs in Ukraine” in Kyiv. He also noted that labor migration is currently seasonal. “According to our estimates, up to nine million Ukrainian citizens take part in this process,” the minister added.
According to Reva, at the moment one of the actual problems of the labor market is the unemployment rate among young people and the inability to find a large number of internally displaced persons. In addition, a large shadow employment and a disproportion between the supply and demand for skilled labor are the current problems.
Trilateral negotiations of the European Union, Russia, and Ukraine on Russian gas transit via Ukraine after 2019 may begin in early July, according to European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic. “Time is a precious commodity. I hope to start working with Russia and Ukraine on the trilateral gas agenda in early July,” he wrote on Twitter. “Complex negotiations ahead,” Sefcovic wrote. He said in late May that the objective of these negotiations will be to determine details of gas transit via Ukraine after 2019 and guarantees of such transit.
