MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Unemployment in Euro zone 10% and 9.6% in EU; worst case Spain with 20.3%

Austria and Netherlands have the best employment records

As many as 23 million men and women in the EU were unemployed in July, according to data released by Eurostat on Tuesday. Of these, 15.833 million are from the Eurozone countries.

The unemployment rate in the 16-country Euro region remained stuck at a record 10% in the last month. The jobless rate in the wider 27-nation European Union also remained unchanged at 9.6%.

Spain led the European unemployment chart with 20.3% while Austria was the healthiest, with just 3.8% unemployment. Jobless rate was 20.1% in Latvia and 18.6% in Estonia. In Netherlands the unemployment rate was at a healthy 4.4%.

However, the data revealed some small reasons for cheer. Compared with June 2010, the number of persons unemployed decreased by 45,000. Also unemployment in Germany, Euro-zone's biggest economy, fell to 6.9% from 7.6%, according to Eurostat data.

In the Euro area the number of persons unemployed decreased by 8,000. Compared with July 2009, unemployment rose by 1.108 million in the EU, and by 0.668 million in the Euro area.

The Euro area seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate was 10.0% in July 2010, unchanged compared with June. It was 9.6% in July 2009, according to Europa data.

In early 2000, just below 20 million persons were unemployed in the 27 countries currently forming the European Union, slightly below 9% of the labour force. This figure fell to around 19 million (8.5%) in early 2001 before rising back to around 21 million persons.

It remained around this level from the middle of 2002 up to the middle of 2005, when a period of several years of steadily declining unemployment started. In the first quarter of 2008, the unemployment hit a low of 16 million persons (6.7%) before rising sharply in the wake of the economic crisis.

Unemployment in the U.S. was 9.5% in July and 5.2% in Japan in the same month.