MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Spain's unemployment remains stubbornly high: 4.5 million in August

Spain usually experiences a rise in unemployment numbers in August, with the average rise for the month in the last decade being 49.025, says Labor ministry

A total of 8,070 people joined Spain's jobless queues in August, the first rise in unemployment after six months of improvement, official figures released on Tuesday show. The rise means there were 4,427,930 Spaniards registered as looking for work at the country's unemployment offices at the end of August, Spain's employment ministry figures show.

 The number of people signed on to the country's social security system fell by 97,582 to 16,649,521, the figures reveal.

Spain usually experiences a rise in unemployment numbers in August, with the average rise for the month over the last decade being 49.025, according to the employment ministry. In 2013, however, unemployment fell by 31 in the eighth month of the year.

“The result for the last month was possible to predict given there's a strong seasonal effect in August independent of the general state of the economy,” Secretary of State for Social Security Tomás Burgos said on Tuesday.

“The outcome allows us to maintain our forecasts in terms of our job growth expectations in the medium term,” he added.

The August unemployment figures mean there are now 270,853 fewer people registered as looking for work in Spain than a year ago. A total of 72,955 contracts for ongoing positions were also signed in August, up 16.81% on a year ago.

However these ongoing contracts represented only 6.43% of all contracts signed in August, with 1,135,109 temporary contracts making up the remainder of the new positions created.

Spain's registered unemployed list, produced by the employment ministry, is a different measure from the survey-based benchmark quarterly unemployment rate published by the national statistics institute.

The institute recorded 5.5 million unemployed in Spain in June, yielding an unemployment rate of 24.47%. That was lower than the previous quarter but still one of the highest rates in the developed world, second only to Greece in the Euro zone.

The high figure reflected the lingering impact of the busting in 2008 of a building boom, which sparked five years of stop-start recession in the Euro zone's fourth-biggest economy.

Spain emerged timidly from recession in mid-2013 and in the second quarter of this year posted its strongest quarterly growth since 2007, expanding by 0.6%.