The Situation of Public Employment in Small Villages in Hungary

Abstract

The author started to deal with the public employment programme as an instrument of active employment policy in Hungary in the last 9 years. She perceived that the people living in disadvantaged settlements have limited labour market opportunities. In this research, the focus will be on small villages with less than 500 inhabitants in Hungary. In these settlements, the municipality is very often the only employer and there are almost no job opportunities available other than public employment. In small villages, the distorted demographic age structure, low educational attainment, low-income levels, inadequate infrastructure, physical distance from the cities, multi-generational unemployment, and often a high proportion of Roma inhabitants, make an already difficult and peripheral situation and employment difficult. The paper aims to analyse public employment programmes at a deeper level according to their role in the development of small villages and to identify good practices and successful public employment programmes in social cooperatives implemented by municipalities. The results of a questionnaire survey on the use of public employment will be presented as a commonly used employment solution in peripheral areas.