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发帖数: 29846 | 1 MADRID (AFP) – Spain announced Friday its jobless rate surged to a 13-year
record above 20 percent at the end of 2010, the highest level in the
industrialized world, as the economy struggled for air.
It was more bad news for an economy fighting to regain the trust of
financial markets and avoid being trapped in a debt quagmire that has
engulfed Greece and Ireland and now menaces Portugal.
Another 121,900 people joined Spain's unemployment queues in the final
quarter of the year, pushing the total to 4.697 million people, said the
national statistics institute INE.
The resulting unemployment rate was 20.33 percent for the end of the year --
easily exceeding Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's target of 19
.4 percent.
Spain appears to be stuck in a rut of staggeringly high levels of
unemployment.
After posting a jobless rate of 18.83 percent in 2009 and now 20.33 percent
in 2010, the government is forecasting 19.3 percent for 2011 and 17.5
percent in 2012.
The Spanish economy, the European Union's fifth biggest, slumped into
recession during the second half of 2008 as the global financial meltdown
compounded the collapse of a labour-intensive construction boom
It emerged with tepid growth of just 0.1 percent in the first quarter of
2010 and 0.2 percent in the second but then stalled with zero growth in the
third.
Zapatero has said the fourth quarter will show positive growth which would
pick up steam in 2011 but he warned that job creation would be "far from
what we need and desire. It will be slow and progressive."
Last month the government announced it was scrapping a 426-euro ($568)
monthly subsidy for the long-term unemployed so as to slash the public
deficit and ease fears that it will need an EU bailout.
The government forecasts a 0.3-percent drop in growth this year will be
followed by an expansion of 1.3 percent in 2011.
Madrid estimates 70 percent of the two million jobs which were lost in Spain
since the start of the economic downturn were directly or indirectly
related to the construction sector.
Last year the government introduced a hotly contested labour market reform
that cut the country's high cost of firing workers and gave companies more
flexibility to reduce working hours and staff levels in economic downturns -
- changes that he argued would boost job creation.
Spaniards see unemployment as Spain's biggest problem and one in two, 49.8
percent, fear the jobless situation will get worse, a poll published by the
CIS research firm this month showed. |
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