Unemployment in Lithuania in 1918 - 1940

The changes brought by the second wave of the industrial revolution and the developing world brought to life some social and economic outcomes that had been non-existent before. Apart from the world’s political, technological and social advances, some negative outcomes of such improvement also came into being. Lithuania did not escape hardships either. Unemployment that emerged at the intersection of the 19th and the 20th centuries was particularly prominent in the period of 1918–1940, the period of the general modernisation of Lithuania. Such factors as the consequences of the First World War, the post-war crisis as well as the Great Depression, Lithuania’s joining to the world’s economic system, the changing structure of the country’s economy and the state’s persistent economic and social policy affected Lithuanians’ social development and employment. The emergence of the problem of unemployment should be considered not as a consequence of an independent state but as an inevitable issue that had to be recognised and acquainted with first and only then tackled