ARCHIVED - Christmas brought falls in unemployment to Murcia and most of Spain

The jobless total in Murcia has fallen by over 3 per cent in the last year

The seasonal nature of the job market in Spain is almost always responsible for a fall in the number of people out of work in this country during December as extra staff are taken on in the retail and services sectors, but the figures for last month which were released on Friday by the Ministry of Employment show that the results last month of 2019 were the least positive for December for years.

A fall of just 34,579 (or 1.08 per cent) meant the total remained well above the 3 million barrier at 3,163,605, and although the overall downward trend was maintained the figure now stands at only 1.21 per cent (or 38,692) lower than a year ago: after six years of steady decreases this is comfortably more than 2 and a half million fewer than the peak which was reached in February 2013, but the latest figures lend further support to the theory that the total has bottomed out and reached stability after the rise and fall of the last decade. In July the jobless total reached its lowest level since November 2008 but with the economy as a whole beginning to slow down many feel that any further improvement will be minimal or non-existent.

During December the number of people in work and making social security contributions rose slightly to over 19.4 million.

At the same time, though, the unemployment figure rose in 4 of the 17 regions of Spain, all of them in the north, with the sharpest upward movement again reported in La Rioja (1.9 per cent), while the most significant decreases were recorded in Andalucía (-2.1 per cent) and the Region of Murcia, where a drop of 1.67 per cent took the figure down to 98,941.

Murcia was also one of the best performing regions during 2019 as a whole, with a decrease of 3.32 per cent, while other results ranged from a rise of 3.2 per cent in Castilla-La Mancha to a fall of 5.1 per cent in Castilla y León.

It should be remembered that the monthly data regarding unemployment which are produced by the Ministry of Employment are usually lower than those featured in the quarterly Active Population Survey (EPA), because the EPA also takes into account those who are out of work but for one reason or another have chosen not to register as such at employment offices. The latest EPA for the third quarter of 2019 reports that there were 3,214,400 unemployed in Spain at the end of September, 3.36 per cent fewer than twelve months previously, while in Murcia the figure reported was 102,000.

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