Spain, leader in youth unemployment with a rate of 27% that doubles that of the eurozone

2023-08-01 16:46:14

Spain continues to lead Europe in two lists that are not recommended: unemployment rate and youth unemployment. Our country returned to the top position in the euro area unemployment indices in June, registering 11.7% and almost doubling the average for euro countries.

In the euro area, the unemployment rate remained stable in June at 6.4%, its lowest level in the historical series, according to data published this Tuesday by Eurostat. It is one point less than the level of unemployment that existed before the pandemic, when in February 2020 the unemployment rate in the euro area stood at 7.4%.

In the month of June, a total of 10.8 million people were unemployed in the euro area, 441,000 fewer than a year earlier. Of these, 2.8 million were residents of Spain, the highest volume in the entire eurozone despite having cut unemployment by 178,000 people in one year. The Spanish rate (11.7%) exceeds that of all its partners: Greece (11.1%), Italy (7.4%), France (7.1%), Portugal (6.4%) or Germany (3%).

In youth unemployment the figures are more alarming. While in the euro zone it fell to 13.8% in June, Spain doubled the rate to stand at 27.4%, the highest among the twenty countries that make up the euro zone, ahead of Greece’s 23.6% and 21.3% from Sweden. In total, 464,000 people under 25 years of age were unemployed at the end of June in Spain, 21% of all young unemployed in the euro area.

And this despite the fact that the rate is the lowest recorded in Spain for fifteen years. Data from the Active Population Survey (EPA) published a few days ago revealed that the current rate had not been seen since the last quarter of 2008, just before the financial crisis broke out and unemployment skyrocketed among citizens, but with a special incidence in the young.

In addition, according to the EPA, at the end of the second quarter there were 809,400 young people between the ages of 16 and 29 in Spain who neither study nor work (‘ninis’), 4,200 more than there were in the same quarter of 2022.

Few young people on staff

In this way, one in five unemployed people under the age of 25 is Spanish, despite the fact that their volume has decreased by 16,000 people in one year and that the rate is almost two points lower than that of June 2022, when it marked the 29th. % of the total compared to 14.7% in the euro area, according to Eurostat records, one of the biggest falls in euro countries.

Half of the companies have less than 15% of their workforce under 30 years of age

In this sense, a report published this Tuesday by Infoempleo and Adecco reveals that half of Spanish companies have less than 15% of the workforce under 30 years of age and that 72% have not implemented any strategy to promote youth employment in the last year. Of the few that have done so, most are through internships in collaboration with training centers and only a few have training programs and scholarships.

The report also indicates that three out of ten companies will have problems replacing employees who retire due to a lack of trained personnel in their business area. In this way, generational change is one of the issues that most worries companies, something that is seen above all in sectors such as construction, transport, industry or hospitality, where the lack of young people in the workforce seems a fact, according to what can be extracted from the study.

More unemployed women

By gender, women continue to have a higher unemployment rate than men, both in the euro area as a whole and in Spain. In the euro countries the unemployment rate stood at 6.7% among women, compared to 6.1% in the case of men, levels similar to those of the month of May.

In Spain, the male unemployment rate is 10.2%, the highest in the euro countries, although two tenths below the figure for May and almost one point below the levels of a year ago. In the case of women, unemployment increased to 13.3%, one point below the level of a year ago. It is the only case in which Spain does not lead the table, but Greece surpasses us, where female unemployment reaches 14%.