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April 25th, 2013 
Peter Nolan
Posted
Spain’s unemployment rate has climbed to a new record of 27.16 per cent in the first quarter of 2013, as a deep recession sparked by the collapse of a property bubble ravages the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy.
The jobless rate jumped from 26.02 per as the number of unemployed climbed by 237,400 people to 6.2 million, Spain’s national statistics institute said.
Spain, once the motor of job creation in the eurozone, is in a double-dip recession, having yet to recover from the collapse in 2008 of a labour-intensive property boom.
The Spanish economy contracted by 1.37 per cent last year, the second worst yearly slump since 1970, and the government forecasts it will shrink again by between 1 and 1.5 per cent this year.
The jobless rate fell to an almost 30-year low of 7.95 per cent in the second quarter of 2007 at the peak of an economic boom that allowed the country to create more than half the new jobs in the eurozone between 2002 and 2005.
But unemployment has risen steadily every quarter since as the country’s housing market collapsed, throwing millions of people out of work, and it is expected to continue rising.
In France, the second biggest eurozone economy, official data to be released overnight is also expected to show a record number of jobless workers.
The jump in Spanish unemployment has caused the number of evictions to soar, led food banks to be overwhelmed with demand for aid and forced tens of thousands of immigrants to return home.
Courts have executed 252,826 eviction orders – including a record 75,605 last year – since 2008.
The number of households in which all eligible members are unemployed rose by 72,400 in the first quarter, reaching 1.91 million overall.
Spain, a nation of 47 million people, suffers from a lack of competitiveness inside the eurozone and excessive household and company debt and is seriously hobbled by a troubled banking sector.
Under pressure from Brussels, prime minister Mariano Rajoy’s conservative government has reformed labour laws to make it easier to hire and fire workers and imposed harsh austerity measures to rein in the public deficit, which critics charge has pushed up unemployment.
AFP
Topics:
economic-trends,
unemployment,
international-financial-crisis,
community-and-society,
event,
business-economics-and-finance,
spain,
european-union
Source Article from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-04-25/spanish-unemployment-rate-at-record-2716-per-cent/4651712
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