CASCADING CONSEQUENCES OF UNEMPLOYMENT

Combating poverty represents one of the challenges of the modern economy and Europe’s geopolitical situation contributes to worsening this problem. Economic growth and employment rate are determinants of the level of poverty in a society. Unemployment and its consequences are widely approached both in economic literature and in sociology and psychology. In the first part of the paper, we carried out a conceptual presentation of the economic and social consequences of unemployment at the national, individual, and family level. In the second part, starting from Okun’s law, we made an analysis of the relationship between the gross domestic product and unemployment rate for the period from 2005-2022 in Romania. In order to carry out the research, we used a series of statistical data regarding the unemployment rate available in the Monthly Bulletins of the National Bank of Romania (NBR) and data on GDP available on the website of the National Institute of Statistics of Romania (NIS). We worked with data regarding the situation in Romania from the first quarter of 2005 – fourth quarter of 2022. The conclusions of the paper converge towards the idea that unemployment is, nowadays, an increasingly complex phenomenon, being generated by a multitude of factors and which, in turn, determine multi-level direct and indirect consequences.