Finally, unemployment in the 19 nations which use the Euro has fallen to (marginally) less than one person in ten. This is the first time that unemployment has dipped below the 10% mark since 2011. Data released by Eurostat shows that unemployment stood at 9.8% as an average for the Eurozone in October. The mark was actually passed in September when revised data showed that unemployment had fallen to 9.9% from an initial reading on the 10% mark. The decline in unemployment in October corresponds to 178000 fewer people out of work in the bloc and means that 1.12 million people have found work over the past year. The data suggests that 16 million people are seeking work within the Eurozone currently which is the lowest total since 2009.
Unsurprisingly, given the heterogeneous nature of the economies which share the Euro, unemployment within the Eurozone remains very patchy. In Greece, 23.4% of the workforce is unemployed whereas only 4.1% of the German workforce is idle, largely corresponding to full employment.
Portugal continues to see employment picking up. In the latest figures, 10.8% of Portuguese workers are unemployed, but that is down from 11.9% a year ago. The long-term average unemployment in Portugal is 7.7%, so there is still a long way to go before the employment situation in Portugal gets back to fully normal. By way of comparison, the long-term average unemployment figure for Greece is 15.5% and 5.6% in Germany.
Eurozone unemployment averaged 7.2% before the Global Financial Crisis which still casts a long shadow over EU economies. However, unemployment fell in 14 out of 17 Eurozone nations with Greece and Estonia not contributing data and Cyprus and Lithuania reporting unchanged figures – only Malta saw a slight rise in unemployment. For the wider EU, unemployment fell from 8.4 to 8.3% between September and October.
Unemployment of people under the age of 25 remains problematic at 20.7% across the Eurozone as a whole, however, it too is moving in the right direction having fallen from 22.2% a year earlier.