Date Published: 28/01/2021
ARCHIVED - Over 600,000 jobs were lost to the coronavirus pandemic in Spain last year
ARCHIVED ARTICLE
Unemployment increased by 16 per cent to over 3.7 million
A year has now elapsed since the first cases of coronavirus were detected in Spain and, while the third wave of contagion continues to place the country’s hospitals under almost unbearable strain, sufficient time has passed for it to begin to be possible to evaluate the extent of the damage done to the national economy.
On Thursday the government’s central statistics unit published its Active Population Survey for the final quarter of 2020, showing that the number of jobs lost during the pandemic (calculated by comparing the data to those of the same period in 2019) was 622,000. At the same time the number of people out of work rose by almost 528,000, or 16 per cent, leaving the unemployment rate at 16.1 per cent.
A year ago the rate was looking far healthier at under 13.8 per cent, and it should also be remembered that the data published could become worse when the ERTE furlough schemes permitted during the pandemic come to an end. Around 900,000 people are currently registered as being in employment although at the end of last year they were not working due to the circumstances surrounding the pandemic.
These unencouraging figures are reported despite the last quarter of the year providing better results than might have been expected, coinciding as it did with the second wave of infection. The number of people in employment fell by only 0.87 per cent between October and December, while the jobless total rose by just 0.08 per cent to 3,719,800.
Murcia, La Rioja and Extremadura escaped the loss of jobs
Over the course of the year the breakdown of the 17 figures by regions of Spain shows some interesting differences: for example, while the decrease in the number of people in employment was almost universal, the worst affected regions being the Canaries (-12 per cent) and the Balearics (-8.1 per cent), the figures actually increased slightly in Murcia, La Rioja and Extremadura.
Similarly, while the number of people out of work rose spectacularly in the Balearics (by 75.2 per cent) and extremely significantly in the Canaries, Madrid, Catalunya, Navarra and Aragón (all by over 20 per cent), the figures fell in Extremadura, Murcia and Galicia. Given that prior to the third wave of the pandemic these regions are among those with the lowest rates of infection, it is hard not to deduce a correlation.