A total of 43 million people aged 15 to 64 in the European Union work part-time in 2017, representing a fifth (19.4 percent) of the total number of people with a job in the EU, according to data published on Friday by Eurostat.
Among the Member States, part-time work is most popular in the Netherlands, where half (49.8 percent) of all employed persons aged between 15 and 64 work part-time. Other EU Member States working part-time are frequent: Austria (27.9 percent), Germany (26.9 percent), Denmark (25.3 percent) and Great Britain (24.9 percent).
At the opposite end, part-time work is less common in Bulgaria (2.2 percent), Hungary (4.3 percent), Croatia (4.8 percent), Slovakia (5.8 percent), Czech Republic, 2 percent), Poland (6.6 percent) and Romania (6.8 percent).
Also, in 2017 a quarter (26.4 percent) of those working part-time in the EU did not choose such a program. The bulk of involuntary part-time work is recorded in Greece, where 70.2 percent of part-time employees have not chosen such a program, followed by Cyprus (67.4 percent), Italy 62.5 percent), Spain (61.1 percent), Bulgaria (58.7 percent) and Romania (55.8 percent).
In contrast, less than 10 percent of those working part-time in Estonia (7.5 percent), Belgium (7.8 percent), the Netherlands (8.2 percent), the Czech Republic (9.1 percent) and Malta (9.6 percent) did not choose such a program.