Lietuva in brief - 2012-08-23

Statistics Lithuania says that, according to the labor force survey data, the unemployment rate in the country in the second quarter of this year stood at 13.3 percent, 1.2 percentage points less than in the same quarter in 2011, reports ELTA. In the second quarter, there were 215,100 unemployed persons in the country, which is by 15,800 (6.8 percent) less than in the first quarter. Compared with Q1, the male unemployment rate fell by 1.2 percent and accounted for 15.3 percent, whereas female unemployment went down by 1.1 percent and stood at 11.3 percent. In Q2, the rate of long-term unemployment was 6.4 percent. It was 0.9 percent lower than in Q1. Youth unemployment (aged 15-24) in Q2 compared with Q1 in 2012 decreased by 3.5 percent and amounted to 25.2 percent.

Liberal Centrist Mayor of Visaginas Dalia Straupaite (53) will try to become a member of Lithuania’s parliament: she is in the top 10 of the Liberal and Center Union’s (LiCS) list, reports ELTA. The party’s Executive Secretary Raimundas Palaitis said that Straupaite wants to stand for parliamentary elections in order to convince society of the necessity to build a new nuclear power plant (NPP). “The decision to hold a referendum on the Visaginas NPP helped her to make up her mind about standing for elections. She had many doubts about that before the decision on the referendum,” Palaitis said. Straupaite has been the mayor of Visaginas since April of 2011 and head of the LiCS unit in Visaginas since 2003.

A total of 42 percent of the Internet users in Lithuania have already bought goods or services online this year, reports ELTA. On the Internet, Lithuanians most often buy tickets to various events, and clothes, footwear and accessories, showed a poll carried out by the market research company TNS LT. The poll revealed that the number of people who go online for shopping is growing. At the same time, a year ago the number of Internet users who were shopping online accounted for 33 percent, or a 9 percent increase year-on-year. However, Lithuanians shop online on an irregular basis. The majority of online shoppers (60 percent) buy less than once a month. The poll shows that every tenth online shopper buys goods or services at least once a weak, 29 percent of them do so at least twice a month. The poll was conducted from March-May of this year. A total of 1,667 respondents aged from 15 to 74 years were questioned.