The money moved. The people stayed.

Premise

Suppose that after a price falls, the money and the people go in different directions.

This piece assumes that and reads the present from there. It is an assumption, not a conclusion.

Seven countries, one method

A team of economists measured what losing your job costs, in seven European countries, using the same design for each — Denmark, Sweden, France, Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal. All seven have registers that link workers to the firms that employ them, and all seven were harmonised before anything was compared.

In Denmark and Sweden the earnings loss after a layoff is the smallest. In Italy, Spain and Portugal it is three times larger.

France and Austria sit in between.

So the same event — a factory closes, a division is cut, your name is on the list — is priced at three different levels depending on where you are standing when it happens.

Every one of those countries counted. The counting is not what made the difference.

The study points at two routes. In southern Europe, people who lose a job are less likely to find another one, and that gap explains much of the difference. And in all seven, a large share of the loss comes from something more specific: the wage premium that belonged to the old employer. Some firms simply pay more than others for the same work. That premium does not travel with you.

What that has to do with your phone bill

Telecom prices in Europe have fallen. Information and communication prices are 26.6% below their 2010 level. Telecoms took 3.10% of household spending in 2005 and 2.30% in 2022.

Headcount fell too. The European operators’ domestic workforce went from 550,000 in 2019 to 493,000 in 2022. Worldwide, operators employed 4.34 million people in the fourth quarter of 2025, down 1.9% on the year.

Both happened over the same stretch. This piece does not claim the price fall produced the fall in headcount. Prices fall for several reasons — better methods, thinner margins, cheaper inputs, or a change in what is being sold.

But one thing did not happen.

If a company spends less on wages, that saving should show up as profit. MTN Consulting counts telco headcount quarter by quarter and sets it against results, and finds no direct link between the cuts and margin expansion — not at a lag, not measured as operating profit, not as EBITDA.

The same analysis says where it went instead. The wage savings were offset by other costs, chiefly depreciation — the share of a piece of equipment’s value that is written off each year. Build more network and that share grows.

The money went from people to equipment.

After that, the trail stops

Suppose a household stops paying part of its bill. That money goes somewhere. Where?

The common European instrument cannot answer. The Household Budget Survey is not a panel that follows the same households. It shows the shape of spending at each wave, and the waves are not fully comparable with each other. You cannot connect the household before the saving to the same household after it.

The instrument was not built for the question. That is not a flaw in it — it was built to do something else.

Nor can the public table say where the workers went

Some sectors did grow over the same period. The number of ICT specialists rises every year, by 2.6% between 2024 and 2025. Employment in renewables grew 50% between 2015 and 2023. Health, which absorbs more than a tenth of European GDP, is associated with an estimate of two million new jobs.

Did the people who left telecoms arrive there?

The EU’s published labour market flow table does not say. It shows nine transitions between three states — employed, unemployed, outside the labour force. Moving from one job to another while changing industry is not among the figures it puts forward.

The microdata can be worked: the survey records the sector of a previous job, and consecutive quarters can be linked. What is missing is the version a citizen can open.

So the subject is not an inability to measure. It is what public statistics choose to put in front of us.

Two municipalities in Brussels

Something small enough to see happened in December 2024, when a fourth mobile operator entered the Belgian market. The regulator then published an international price comparison. For mobile bundles up to 10 GB a month, Belgium left the expensive end of the table, and the competing operators moved their prices too.

Fixed internet behaved differently. The newcomer’s price was the lowest against neighbouring countries — and it was available only to residents of Anderlecht and Sint-Jans-Molenbeek. On the fixed market, the regulator wrote, there was no reaction yet from the others.

A price drop stopped at the edge of two municipalities.

The two markets do not cost the same to open. On fixed, the largest cost driver is civil works — digging. Bringing fibre to a home runs 200–250 euros per household in a dense city and 1,000–1,500 euros or more further out. Mobile carries no comparable layer.

That is the cost structure as it stands. It is not a claim that the structure explains where the newcomer chose to build. The two are set side by side.

Counting makes it visible. It does not make it smaller.

What we count makes visible what people paid. What sets that price is the labour market and its institutions.

The seven-country result is the cleanest form of this. All of them could see the loss. The loss was still three times larger in some of them than in others. Measurement is a window, not a lever.

The general displacement literature points the same way. Among those re-employed, 56% join a firm that pays less. In some countries earnings halve in the year of the layoff and are still about 10% lower four years on.

Who, in the design of the institutions, was placed to absorb the shock? That is what fixes the price.

What is left over

This piece does not claim AI is the cause. Headcount was falling in telecoms before current AI systems existed. Whether it makes something already under way move faster is worth asking — and this piece goes no further than asking.

Nor is this only about telecoms. Anywhere prices fall and working methods change, the same question stands.

Where did the saved money go? And where is the person who used to receive it?

We do not yet have a public table that answers the second one.

Where the author stands

I do not judge a transition by the total number of jobs alone. I also look at whether people can actually go where the money went.

That is not a recommendation. It is a statement of what I am watching.

What went wrong in the research

While researching this piece I widened “not visible in public statistics” into “nobody counts it.” Checking the linked-records literature knocked that claim down. This piece uses only the evidence that survived the correction.

What this piece established

• The EU Household Budget Survey is not a panel following one household before and after a saving
• The EU’s published labour market flow table does not show moves between industries
• Across seven countries measured on linked data, earnings losses after a layoff varied by up to a factor of three
• The study proposes re-employment probability and the loss of a firm-specific wage premium as the main routes

What this piece does not claim

• That measurement infrastructure reduced the losses
• That AI is the cause of this change
• That falling prices caused the fall in employment