New OECD data shows structural employment gaps across the Eastern Partnership remain despite a decade of economic growth.
The OECD Employment Outlook 2024, published in July 2024, includes a dedicated section on labour market trends in Eastern Partnership countries — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. The findings confirm what national labour force surveys have indicated individually: employment rates in the region significantly lag the EU average, and the gap is structural rather than cyclical. Georgia’s employment rate of 47.1 percent compares to an EU average of approximately 61 percent — a gap of nearly 14 percentage points that has been persistent across most of the past decade.
The Outlook identifies several structural factors contributing to this gap. The first is the size of the agricultural sector and its high informality rate: approximately 40 percent of Georgian employment is in agriculture, where labour force attachment is seasonal and often does not meet the LFS definition of employment (working at least one hour in the reference week for pay or profit). The second is the low female labour force participation rate, driven by inadequate childcare provision, cultural norms around women’s primary role as caregivers, and the concentration of formal employment in cities where women without independent transport face access barriers. The third is the youth employment challenge, documented in detail in GILS’s youth labour analysis.
The Outlook notes that Eastern Partnership countries that have made the most progress on employment rates since 2010 — Moldova and Armenia — have done so primarily through two mechanisms: reduced agricultural employment (as workers shift to services) and increased female participation, driven in Moldova’s case by expanded childcare provision and in Armenia’s by significant growth in the technology sector. Neither of these mechanisms has operated at comparable scale in Georgia.
The report also addresses the quality dimension of employment, noting that informality rates in Eastern Partnership countries remain high and that wage growth, while positive in nominal terms, has not been accompanied by commensurate improvements in productivity — a warning sign about the sustainability of wage increases that are driven by labour market tightening rather than productivity growth.
GILS Note: The OECD findings are consistent with GILS’s own Labour Market Observatory data. The 47.1 percent employment rate cited in OECD data matches our Q4 2024 Geostat figure. For detailed sectoral and regional breakdowns of Georgian employment, and for the full data behind the GILS Observatory indicators, see the Labour Market Observatory page.
Read the full GILS analysis: https://labour.edu.ge/observatory/