Acta Universitatis Danubius. Œconomica, Vol 14, No 4 (2018)

Abstract

The goal of the study is to estimate the correlation between two important macroeconomicvariables in the labour market: the total unemployment rate over the active population (as dependentvariable), respectively the rate of social protection expenditures with the unemployment over GDP (asindependent or causal variable) in Romania. In order to achieve the goal, the following objectives wereachieved: a) the formation of time series and the statistical analysis for the two variables; b) designinga mono-factorial linear econometric model; c) estimation of the econometric model. The empirical dataused are quarterly data between January 1997 and December 2016. The data quality was provided byusing the following sources: EUROSTAT, respectively the Romanian Statistical Yearbook. The mainscientific results of the study are as follows: 1) statistically the time series of the two variables arestationary only at the level of the first order differences, the series of the independent variable is nonnormal,and the dependent variable is quasi-normal; 2) the estimation of the quantitative model showsthat there is a direct correlation (though weak, about 3%) between the dependent and the independentvariable. At the same time, there are no influences outside the independent variable (the free term ofthe first degree equation is approximately - 0.002). In conclusion, it can be said that the variation of thetotal unemployment rate in the active population is direct, albeit relatively weak, influenced by thechange in the rate of social protection expenditures in GDP.