Official statistics show that the registered unemployment rate fell for the third consecutive month in April. The index stopped at 11.5% which is 0.5 percentage points down from March and a point less than a year ago. The rate fell across all statistical regions whereas male joblessness was down 0.6 pp to 10.5% in April over March, and female unemployment edged down 0.3 pp to 12.7%.
With a per capita purchasing power of more than 30,000 euros per year, Luxembourg is home to 540,000 of the EU’s wealthiest citizens. Even the difference to its neighbor Belgium is striking, according to the latest purchasing power figures for Europe prepared by RegioData. A Luxembourger living in the capital currently has an average per capita purchasing power of 36,000 euros per year. Only 1.5 hours away is the Belgian city of Liege, whose purchasing power is more than 40% lower.
Luxembourg leads the globalization ranking with a score of 0.97. Credit Suisse has published another “Success of Small Countries Report.” In the report, they found that small developed states and separate customs territories were economically more successful that their larger peers and that, importantly, they tended to be more globalized. Small states have clearly become the lead indicators of new trends in the world economy.
Luxembourg ICT sector is driving workforce growth. People working in the ICT sector were the biggest beneficiaries of the job growth with employment numbers rising 5.7 percent over a year. In services, they rose 4.4 percent and they grew 2 percent in the finance and insurance sectors. In the latter category, the fastest expanding sectors were funds and pensions.
Finance and insurance may be the biggest money making activities in Luxembourg yet they only account for below 4 percent of the companies registered. Figures published on Monday by analytics body STATEC showed that there were 1,193 financial and insurance companies registered in Luxembourg out of a total 30,476 firms.
A particularly encouraging sign of solid business confidence is a 10% increase in secretarial and support roles advertised since the second quarter, and a 55% uplift compared to the same period last year. The marketing sector also had a busy summer and showed a 4% increase in the quarter and a 28% rise year on year. These sectors defied the usual summer slowdown and correlate to business growth across the country.
Luxembourg’s proportion was higher even than in Switzerland according to the inaugural Wealth Report: Europe 2014, published by Julius Baer Group. In the report is stated that 22.7 percent of Luxembourg households owned a net worth of more than 1 million euros.