MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Spain unemployment rate 14.4% or 3.3 million jobless

Unemployment in Spain, which has the highest jobless rate in the European Union, rose by the most in at least 13 years in January in the 10th monthly increase totalling 3.3 million out of jobs, reported this week the Labour ministry.

The number of people registered as unemployed increased in January 6.4%, equivalent to 198,838 people over the previous month. This was the largest jump since at least 1996. From a year earlier, the number of claimants jumped 47%, or more than a million. Rising unemployment in Spain, once the motor of job-creation in the Euro region, now accounts for almost all of the increase in the region's overall joblessness, according to EU statistics office Eurostat. The government forecasts unemployment will rise to a decade high of almost 16% this year, after the credit crunch brought an abrupt end to a debt-fuelled economic boom and threatens to push the economy into its deepest downturn in half a century. "We won't reach the four million mark," Labour Minister Celestino Corbacho said in an interview with radio station Radio Nacional de España. "The official government forecasts point to a maximum unemployment rate of 16% ....and this is not four million people," Corbacho said. Earlier Employment Secretary Maravillas Rojo did not rule out that unemployment would hit four million. "Forecasts are not exact or unchangeable," Rojo told a news conference. But Corbacho played down any contradiction with his minister. "I don't think there is any contradiction here. Every government in the world has had to modify its forecasts," he said. Spain's jobless rate is already almost double the European average, at 14.4% in December, compared with 7.4% for the EU overall, according to the most recent monthly data from the region's statistics office. Youth unemployment in Spain rose to 29.5% in December, compared with an EU average of 16.6%. Spain's jobless rate fell to an almost 30-year low of 7.95% in the second quarter of 2007 at the peak of a construction boom that allowed the country to create more than half the new jobs in the Euro region between 2002 and 2005. Unemployment, as measured by a quarterly survey, has risen every quarter since the 2007 peak. As the construction slump spread to the rest of the economy, carmaker Nissan Motor said it would cut 38% of its workforce at a factory in Spain and Renault SA won Spanish government approval to temporarily lay off as many as 10,311 workers. Meanwhile in Ireland the number claiming unemployment benefit rocketed in January to the highest monthly level since records began in 1967. Figures showed 326,100 people made unemployment claims in January, up from 293,100 in December, according to the Central Statistics Office (CSO). The CSO also said the unemployment rate rose to 9.2% last month, the highest rate since January 1998. The Irish Republic fell into recession in September last year.