Catalonia leads the creation of employment throughout Spain. A total of 79,600 people have found work and 79,200 people have signed off from unemployment in the last three months. Catalonia, therefore, has become one of the territories with the lowest unemployment rate: 13.2%. This is the figure published today by the Active Population Survey (EPA).
Catalonia has reduced the level of unemployment in absolute terms, followed by the Balearic Islands with 65,000 fewer unemployed, and Andalusia, which in turn has reduced unemployment by 53,500 people. Looking at the relative values, the communities with a more important quarterly increase in employment are the Islands, with a rise of 13.29%.
Unemployment drop in Spain
Unemployment fell in the second quarter by 340,700 people throughout Spain and stood at 3,914,300, leaving the unemployment rate at 17.22%, which is 1.53% less than in the previous quarter. This makes the second quarter the best figure for the decline of unemployment recorded during this series of historic records.
With regards to the growth of employment, the number of people newly employed in the whole of Spain reached 375,000. In the last twelve months, employment has increased by 512,300 jobs.
Seasonal high
In the whole of Spain, even though the increase in employment is greater than the reduction in unemployment, 3,914,300 are still out of work, whilst 8,813,000 are employed. In fact, in the last year, the number of active people has decreased by 148,000 (-0,6%).
In addition, another problem is the high seasonality of jobs, which seems not to stop. Of the 349,500 new contracts generated in these last months, 255,900 were temporary (73.1%), whilst the permanent contracts reached 93,600.
One in two young people, unemployed
One of the positive figures is the reduction in youth unemployment. The number of unemployed people under 25 dropped by 8,000 in the second quarter of the year, 1.3% up from the previous quarter.
The fall is still very low compared to the worrying total figure of youth unemployment, which stood at 47.6% in the second quarter. In other words, right now, one in two young Spaniards of working age does not have a job.
The EPA data shows much more unemployment than the monthly unemployment data published by the INE. The difference lies in what is counted as an unemployed person. The INE does not include students looking for work, some beneficiaries of agricultural subsidies or those who seek self-employment. The EPA, however, does include them.