3 papers
Business services: consulting, legal, accounting, and the agencies themselves.
Labour scarcity is no longer a matter of the business cycle. The Dutch central bank concluded in 2024 that an ageing population leaves labour supply barely growing through to 2040. If supply stops growing, demand adapts: firms scale work back, raise its price, or automate it. Business services already shows this. In numbers the gap is nearly closed; in quality it is wide.
Seven Dutch regulators that have kept the same form since 2010 grew from 2,730 to 4,772 full-time staff, a rise of 75%. The data protection authority went from 79 to 312, the mines inspectorate from 57 to 188, the healthcare authority from 254 to 521. The financial markets regulator AFM grew 70% and the central bank DNB 54%. The central government as a whole employed 160,016 full-time staff at the end of 2025 against 114,328 at the end of 2010, up 40.0%. The whole Dutch economy grew 19.6% in full-time years over the same period. Inside the central government, inspection work grew 33.5% between 2021 and 2025, against 22.0% for all staff. The growth tracks new legal duties: the GDPR in 2018, online gambling in 2021, the Groningen earthquakes, and new European financial rules. The Jetten cabinet books €1.4bn of savings on the government apparatus in 2030. The CPB, the government's own forecaster, counts €0.2bn of it and calls the rest implausible while no tasks are dropped. Growth already stalled in 2025: the competition authority shrank, the health inspectorate shrank, the healthcare authority stood still, and the central government added 1.9%.
The Netherlands employed 215,000 administrative clerks in 2025 against 283,000 in 2013, a fall of 24.0% over a period in which the employed labour force grew 16.6%. Secretarial staff went from 64,000 to 35,000, down 45.3%. Administrative personnel as a whole fell from 829,000 to 801,000 and its share of all jobs from 9.8% to 8.1%. At the top of the same occupational class the opposite happened: business and administration specialists went from 357,000 to 707,000, a doubling, with accountants, management consultants, policy advisers, and HR specialists each growing around 100%. New vacancies for administrative personnel fell from 158,200 in 2022 to 114,500 in 2025, 27.6% fewer, against 8.6% fewer for all occupations. Those still in clerical work are old: 31.0% are 55 or over, against 23.3% of all workers. That makes a shrinking occupation a hiring problem for years to come.
