Sweden’s National Public Employment Agency (Arbetsförmedlingen) reports that 9 percent of the country’s workforce was unemployed or part of a government-sponsored job scheme in December 2009 compared to 5.8 percent at the end of 2008.
However both the number of job vacancies and the number of people finding jobs has started to rise and redundancies are becoming less common than a year ago.
“There are strong reasons to believe that we will soon leave the labour market downturn behind us,” said the employment agency’s deputy director, Lena Liljebäck, in a statement.
According to the employment agency, 30,000 people registered with the agency found jobs last month, which is ten percent more than the previous year. There were just over 28,000 job vacancies in the country, a thousand more than at the same time in 2008 and the number of redundancies was down by almost two-thirds.
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