Cyprus is one of nine EU member states, where employment rates for non nationals are higher than those of Cypriot nationals, according to Eurostat.
While the employment rate for 2015 stood at 79.3 for Cypriots, Eurostat says that it was actually higher, at 82.2% for non Cypriots, of whom 82.7% were EU nationals and 81.5% non EU nationals.
This trend is in contrast to the general findings for the EU where in 2015 the proportion of people economically active (employed and unemployed) stood just below 70% for non-EU citizens aged 20 to 64 (69.8%), while the activity rate was above 77% for citizens of the reporting country (77.3%), referred to as “nationals”.
A similar pattern is observed in most EU Member States. In detail, non-EU citizens aged 20 to 64 were faced with a notably higher unemployment rate and lower employment rate than nationals. The picture was very different when analysing the labour market situation of nationals compared with that of citizens of another EU Member State.
In a majority of Member States, the activity rate of nationals was higher than for non-EU citizens, except in particular in Greece (72.6% for nationals compared with 80.7% for non-EU citizens) and Slovenia (75.7% vs. 83.5%), followed by Slovakia (76.2% vs. 81.3%), Italy (67.9% vs. 72.6%), Spain (78.7% vs. 82.0%), Cyprus (79.3% vs. 81.5%), Portugal (79.0% vs. 80.9%), the Czech Republic (78.7% vs. 79.2%) and Hungary (73.8% vs. 74.1%). In 2015 across Member States, the most significant differences between the activity rates for non-EU citizens and for nationals were recorded in the Netherlands (59.7% for non-EU citizens compared with 82.2% for nationals, or -22.5 percentage points), Finland (-18.8 pp) and Germany (-18.3 pp), followed by France (-15.7 pp), Denmark (-15.6 pp), Sweden (-15.3 pp) and Belgium (-14.6 pp). On average in the EU, the difference between the activity rate for non-EU citizens (69.8%) and for citizens of the reporting country (77.3%) was -7.5 percentage points in 2015.
Looking in detail at their respective situation on the labour market, the employment rate for non-EU citizens aged 20 to 64 in the EU stood at 56.7% in 2015, while it was 70.6% for nationals. The share of employees with a temporary contract was higher for non-EU citizens (21.4%) than for nationals (12.9%). The pattern was the same for the proportion of part time employment, which was more widespread amongst non-EU citizens (28.3%) than amongst nationals (18.4%). For unemployment, the rate for non-EU citizens aged 20 to 64 (18.9%) was more than twice the level for nationals (8.7%). However, the s