Jobless in Europe

If you want to read depressing news, read not more. The unemployment situation in Europe is continuing, and countries like Greece ans Spain are in deep trouble. From Europa.eu.

What are the recent labour market trends?

The economic and employment outlook is bleak and has worsened in recent months and is not expected to improve in 2013, although a more positive outlook for the labour markets is still expected in 2014. The EU is currently the only major region in the world where unemployment is still rising.

The general picture covers a very diverse situation across Member States. There is a growing divergence between unemployment situations. Some MS have weathered the economic crisis well and are recording very low unemployment rates, as low as 4.4% in Austria or 5.4% in the Netherlands and Germany. This is the result of the generally good economic situation in these countries but also because they are reaping the benefits of previous reforms initiated long before the economic crisis hit. In other Member States unemployment is high or rising. Usually these are the countries that were hit hardest by the sovereign and financial crisis, such as Greece or Spain where the unemployment rate is above 25%. But these are also countries with well-identified problems in their labour markets, such as segmentation, insufficiently effective active labour market policies or ineffective links between school and work. These shortcomings have amplified the effects of the crisis though they were not the cause.

Net job creation (employment growth) has consistently decreased at EU level and across Member States. However jobs are still being created or remain unfilled in a number of sectors. During the 2008-2011 period, the ‘health and social work’ sector created more than 1.8 million new jobs and the net demand in this sector is expected to increase by 8 million up to 2020. In the ICT sector, by 2015, is expected that up to 700 000 unfilled vacancies will be available for ICT practitioners.

Unemployment is rising again and has reached unprecedented levels in the euro area. The overall unemployment rate of the EU-27 is currently at 10.6%, while in the euro area it reaches 11.6 %, the highest level since the birth of the EMU. In May 2012 the number of unemployed in the EU exceeded 25 million people for the first time ever and it has increased by an additional 0.75 million in the quarter since then bringing the increase to almost 9 million since 2008. The trend in unemployment is upward in the majority of the Member States.

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