Unemployment

Greek retail sales by volume fell 3.8 percent in May compared to the same month last year, after a downwardly revised 7.1 percent rise in April, statistics service ELSTAT said on Thursday.

Average unemployment rates in Bulgaria in 2013 were 11.3%, and the average rate of unemployed in the country was 371 380 per month, the National Statistics Institute (NSI) reports.

A substantial share of the unemployed in Bulgaria's employment offices were periodically released employed people without a mass lay offs procedure, mainly from small and medium companies.

23.3% of households in Bulgaria live below the poverty threshold, according to Nikolay Nenkov from the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions in Bulgaria (CITUB).

Nenkov gave a press conference Monday to present a report on the cost of living in June 2014.

Registered unemployment rate nearly 30 percent

BELGRADE -- The number of the unemployed in Serbia totaled 778,577 people on May 31 this year, putting the registered jobless rate at 29.53 percent.

This is according to the date of the National Employment Service.

BELGRADE - The number of the unemployed in Serbia totaled 778,577 people on May 31 this year, putting the registered jobless rate at 29.53 percent, according to the National Employment Service's data.

While three quarters of Europeans (75 percent) are satisfied with their lives, only 42 percent of Greeks appear satisfied with their personal situation (compared to 58 percent in autumn 2013), according to a Eurobarometer report regarding life in Europe released on Friday.

BELGRADE - Leader of the New Democratic Party (NDS) Boris Tadic has warned about the danger of a global social crisis caused by the growing social inequality at a summit of the Progrešive Alliance in Montevideo.

Greece's economy should grow 0.7 percent this year, pulling clear of a six-year recession, but its soaring unemployment rate is likely to drop less than hoped, the country's leading economic think tank said on Wednesday.

Every country aims to lower inflation, unemployment and lending rates, while increasing gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Through a simple sum of the former three rates, minus year-on-year per capita GDP growth, I constructed a misery index that comprehensively ranks 89 countries based on misery. The table below is a sub-ranking of all Balkan states presented in the full index.

EU helps Balkans to reduce unemployment