Piotr Müller made the remark at a news conference in Warsaw on Monday, public broadcaster Polish Radio’s IAR news agency reported.
The government spokesman noted that Poland’s jobless rate stood at 2.7 percent in April, the lowest figure in the 27-nation EU, alongside the Czech Republic, according to the bloc’s statistics agency Eurostat.
In April 2015, the proportion of unemployed people in Poland totalled 7.9 percent, the tvp.info website noted.
In the intervening eight years, the number of registered jobless people in Poland fell from 1.8 million to 822,000, according to tvp.info.
Müller commented: “When it comes to Poland’s unemployment rate, the trend has been very positive for a long time…. According to Eurostat, we have the EU’s lowest jobless rate, along with the Czech Republic.”
The government spokesman said these figures “prove the effectiveness of the government’s policy of providing financial support to businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic and the turbulence related to Russia's war on Ukraine, including the energy blackmail” from the Kremlin.
Müller told reporters that thanks to the financial support from the government, “Polish firms have been able to maintain jobs and grow, which is reflected in very positive data regarding GDP.”
Citing figures published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the government spokesman said that Poland’s economy had grown by 3.8 percent in the first quarter of 2023, compared with the fourth quarter of 2022, “almost twice as fast as China and 13 times faster than Group of Seven (G7) countries,” which are the world’s biggest advanced economies, tvp.info reported.
‘Poland will not support EU’s plan for mandatory relocation of migrants’
At Monday’s news conference, the government spokesman also reiterated Poland’s opposition to the EU’s new so-called migration package, which foresees mandatory relocation of migrants between member states.
Müller said: “The EU plan would effectively encourage human traffickers to continue to smuggle people illegally into the bloc’s territory.”
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Source: IAR, tvp.info, wgospodarce.pl