Which European regions have the highest employment rates?

When looking at European employment rates on a map, it’s easy to see the division between northern and southern states.

Eurostat, the European Commission’s statistics office, found that after dividing countries into 242 basic regions (NUTS 2), two fifths of areas had an employment rate equal to or above 78%.

These areas were predominantly concentrated in Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Malta, the Netherlands and Sweden.

In the Finnish archipelago of Åland, Eurostat noted the highest employment rate of 89.7%, and the second highest rate was recorded in the Polish capital region of Warsaw, where employment was at 85.4%.

The Dutch region of Utrecht and the Swedish capital region of Stockholm came in behind these two areas, both with an employment rate of 85.1%.

On the other end of the scale, in three regions in southern Italy, Eurostat found that less than half of the population was employed in 2022.

These areas were Sicily (46.2%), Calabria (47.0%) and Campania (47.3%).

In some parts of Turkey, the employment rate fell even lower than in Italy, collectively recorded at 32.8% in the cities of Mardin, Batman, Şırnak, and Siirt.

Out of the regions studied, Eurostat found that 9 in 10 witnessed an increase in employment rates between 2021 and 2022.

The top five areas with the highest rate growth include four Greek regions: Epirus (up 7.7 percentage points), Southern Aegean (+5.8), Crete (+5.7) and Central Greece (+5.4).

High growth was also seen in the Spanish Canary Islands, with an increase of 5.5 percentage points.

That said, a rising employment rate wasn’t noted across the board, as a minority of states saw a decline in the number of their citizens working.

The Polish region of Opole Voivodeship witnessed a fall of 1.5 percentage