The 13.3% unemployment rate captures one dimension of Georgia’s labour market slack. The ILO’s composite underutilisation measure — at approximately 21% — captures the full picture.
Georgia’s official unemployment rate of 13.3 percent in 2024 is the figure that appears in government communiqués, international assessments, and economic forecasts. It is a real number, derived from a properly conducted Labour Force Survey using internationally comparable methodology. But it is also an incomplete picture of how Georgia’s labour market actually functions — and understanding the difference between the headline rate and the fuller measure of labour underutilisation is essential for anyone trying to diagnose the country’s employment situation accurately.
The ILO’s framework for measuring labour underutilisation identifies three categories beyond unemployment that together capture the full extent of unmet labour demand. The first is time-related underemployment: workers who are employed but work fewer hours than they would like and are available to work more. In Georgia, this category is particularly large in agriculture and in the informal service sector, where seasonal patterns and irregular demand produce substantial underemployment that the unemployment statistics do not capture. The second category is the potential labour force: people who are not in employment, are not actively seeking work, but are available to work if a suitable opportunity arose. In Georgia, this includes a significant population of women with caring responsibilities who have withdrawn from the labour market but have not been counted as unemployed because they are not actively job-seeking. The third is a subset of the potential labour force who are not available immediately but are seeking work.
When these three categories are added to the standard unemployment count — producing what the ILO calls the composite measure of labour underutilisation, or LU3 — Georgia’s figure rises to approximately 21 percent. This means that roughly one in five working-age Georgians who could work and want to work is not doing so in a way that fully meets their preferences. The headline 13.3 percent unemployment rate captures only the most visible portion of this reality.
The policy implications of the higher figure are significant. A country with 13 percent unemployment might plausibly argue that its primary labour market challenge is cyclical and will resolve as economic growth continues. A country with 21 percent underutilisation has a structural problem: barriers to full labour market participation that growth alone will not remove. In Georgia’s case, those barriers include inadequate childcare provision (which keeps women out of the labour market), geographic concentration of formal employment in Tbilisi and Batumi (which makes rural workers structurally underemployed rather than temporarily unemployed), seasonal agriculture patterns, and an informal economy that absorbs workers at low productivity and wages rather than formalising their employment.
Geostat has published LU3 data for Georgia since 2018, and the measure has been consistently around 20–22 percent across the period. The government’s official communications do not typically cite LU3 — a choice that shapes the public understanding of the country’s labour market situation in ways that are not neutral.
GILS Position: GILS recommends that Geostat publish LU3 alongside the standard unemployment rate in all official labour market releases, and that the Ministry of Labour use the composite underutilisation measure as a primary policy target alongside the headline unemployment rate. Policies designed to address 13 percent unemployment will be systematically insufficient to address 21 percent underutilisation. The distinction matters for budget allocation, social protection design, and labour market programming.
Read the full GILS analysis: https://labour.edu.ge/labour-underutilisation/