Analytics, Banks, Labour-market, Lithuania, Markets and Companies

Swedbank Lithuania's economist Nerijus Maciulis predicts that the trend for businesses to improve their efficiency and optimize costs will only intensify in the next decade.

"Minimum wages are growing at a rapid pace, at about one-tenth annually. With labor costs rising, it is natural that businesses see an increasing number of opportunities to automate processes both in the service sector and in manufacturing," he told. 

According to the economist, digitization and robotization processes are still destroying more jobs than they are creating. For example, the unemployment rate rose from around 4 percent back in 2007 to around 6 percent currently, although the economy has been in a growth cycle for almost a decade now.

"It will be increasingly important for education institutions and retraining programs to ensure that there are no working-age people who cannot find jobs because their competencies are not required," he said. 

Marius Dubnikovas, a financial analyst, says that technological transformations do pose challenges for some working-age people, but workers will eventually adapt to the changing labor market. 

"In the short term, 5-10 years, of course, there will be such people (who drop out of the labor market), but in the long run, society will adapt," he said. 

Some 3,200 people in Lithuania received notices of group redundancies in 2019, down by almost 44 percent from 5,800 in 2018. In previous years, the figure had usually ranged between 2,300 and 3,200 people.

Unemployment in Lithuania has recently risen above the EU average. Based on the latest data from the EU statistics office Eurostat, Lithuania's jobless rate reached 6.4% last November, compared with the bloc's average of 6.3%.