Official data showed that the unemployed rate in the last three months of 2012 rose 1% to 26%, or 5.97 million people. The figure, the maximum since the mid-1970s, follows Spain’s lengthened recession and cavernous spending cuts.
The collision has been sensitive for 16 to 24-year-olds, who saw the rate in the last quarter of 2012 surge to 55.13% from 52.34% in the earlier three months.
Spain’s economy sink into downturn after its belongings crash left millions of low-skilled workers without a job, and wide-ranging economic decline eroded business and consumer self-assurance.
Jose Luis Martinez, strategist at investment bank Citigroup said, “We haven’t seen the bottom yet and employment will continue falling in the first quarter,”.
The figures, from the National Statistics Institute, mean Spain’s unemployed rate is twice the European Union average.
The joblessness numbers will be a gust for Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s government, which was last year forecasting a unemployed rate of 24.6% by the end of 2012.
When Mr Mariano Rajoy took office in late 2011 there were 5.27 million people jobless in Spain. Youth joblessness continues to be a cause for anxiety across the European Union, not just Spain.
Tackling youth joblessness across the 27-nation bloc has become a serious matter for governments and policymakers.
Italy’s prime minister Mario Monti, said on Thursday that the current challenge was to “bring new life to the economy, and the first ones to benefit will be the youth”.
Italy’s joblessness rate is 11%, and 37% among young people. He said that young people were being helped into work by actions such as awarding tax reprieve to companies employing 16-24-year-olds and changes to enlarge labor market flexibility.
But he said improvements were being impeded by some trade unions’ confrontation to change. Euro stat, the EU’s statistics body, guesstimates that last November there were 5.8 million people (23.7%) aged under 25 unemployed in the 27 countries, of whom 3.73 million (24.4%) were in the euro zone area.
For last November, the lowest rates were in Germany (8%), Austria (9%) and the Netherlands (9.7 %), and the highest was in Greece 57.6 % (September 2012 figure) and Spain (56.5%).
However, a lot of economists have wondered if the unemployed data overstates the problem. Unemployed numbers contain economically immobile people, including young people who are in education.
Some experts dispute that youth joblessness is better and more precisely represented by using a ratio, calculated as the share of total number jobless. This decreases the scope of youth joblessness, although the figures stay high.
Euro stat expected that for the earlier three months of 2011, the ratio of youth unemployed was 19%, the highest in the EU (9.1%) and ahead of Greece (13%), UK (12.4%), Portugal (11.7%), and Germany (4.5%).
Source: BBC
