Women’s Economic Inactivity and Age. Analysis of the Situation in Poland and the EU

The group of economically inactive women is heavily diversified. The reasons for staying outside the labour market are the important factors that differentiate this group. They depend on the age or level of education among others. In addition, there is great geographical heterogeneity of the reasons for economic inactivity. Hence, two questions arise. Firstly, how significant is the geograph­ical diversity of the reasons for staying outside the labour market in the European Union? Secondly, have these geographical differences been changing over time? The main aim of the analysis is the classification of the EU countries taking into consideration reasons for women’s economic inactivity in different age groups. The analysis is carried out applying descriptive statistics and the k‑means method. The data are taken from the publicly available Eurostat’s Labour Force Survey datasets. The study of general tendencies in women’s economic inactivity covers the years 2000–2016. In turn, cluster analysis was carried out for data from 2006, 2010 and 2014. The obtained results confirmed significant diversity of the EU states. In addition, this geographical diversity has been changing over time. We receive the greatest similarity of classification obtained for different periods for the 50–64 age group and the smallest for the 25–49 age group. Moreover, there are noticeable tendencies of a significant decrease in the share of the economically inactive in the group of the oldest individuals (aged 50–64) in the sample. On the other hand, in the youngest group (individuals aged under 25), there are opposite tendencies observed – the share of those who remain outside the labour market increases.