The study checked the employment rate among 25-to 55-year-olds in 241 regions across Europe. Flanders recorded an employment rate of 86.7 per cent, Wallonia 75.0 per cent and Brussels only 74.2 per cent. That puts the figure for Belgium as a whole at 81.5 per cent. As a result Belgium performs worse than 22 other European countries. Only Italy, Greece, Spain and Romania perform more poorly.
What is striking about Belgium is the difference between the regions. The Flemish provinces score remarkably better than Walloon provinces and the Brussels region. West Flanders, with an employment rate of 90.1 per cent, is the fifth best of the 241 regions surveyed in Europe, and East Flanders (89.0 per cent, 17th place) and Limburg (87.4 per cent, 48th place) also score very highly.
Among the Walloon provinces, Walloon Brabant scores best (83.4 per cent, 140th place), but some are at the bottom of the rankings. The worst score is for Liege, which, with an employment rate of 71.5 per cent, is only 225th out of 241 regions. Hainaut (72.5 per cent, 220th place) and Namur (78.5 per cent, 191st place) also record very low scores. A similar situation is encountered in Brussels, which comes home in 212th place with an employment rate of only 74.2 per cent.
People’s country of origin also seems to play a role
Individual employment rates also appear to vary depending on a person’s country of origin. For example, people born outside the European Union show an employment rate of 68.2 per cent in Flanders, 62.7 per cent in Brussels and 57.5 per cent in Wallonia. For people born in Belgium, the employment rate is 90.2 per cent in Flanders, 78.9 per cent in Brussels and 77.8 per cent in Wallonia.
The study also pointed to the ‘extremely low’ employment rate among the Belgian population aged between 55 and 64. This stood at 57.8 per cent in 2023, where it was 75 per cent in the Netherlands and 74.6 per cent in Germany.