Spanish unemployment figures over September give little room for celebration

Yesterday, the official Spanish unemployment figures were presented by the Spanish Ministry of Labor and Immigration. And as (unfortunately) could be expected, the figures were quite bad.

·   The number of registered unemployed people increased in September 2011 by 95,817 persons MoM (2.32%) and by 208.981 persons YoY (5,20%).

·   The total number of registered unemployed people is now 4,226,744. This is 18.26% of the total labor force of 23,136 million people.

·   The unemployment figure non-seasonally adjusted is 4,347,160 (18.78%)

·   Registered unemployment among men is 2,071,510 (16.34% of a total of 12.675 mln men)

·   Registered unemployment among women is 2,155,234 (20.60% of a total of 10.461 mln women)

·   Registered unemployment among youngsters (<25y) is 456,546 (23.74% of a total of 1.922 mln youngsters).

Inquiring minds will notice that the official unemployment rate of the Spanish ministry for Labor and Immigration is in general much lower than in the Eurostat statistics on Spanish unemployment. Especially among youngsters, the unemployment in the Eurostat data is about twice as high as in the official Spanish data.

This will be caused by the data I used for measuring the total size of the Spanish labor force. I collected this data from the Spanish Instituto Nacional de Estadistica (http://www.ine.es/). Especially with the data concerning youngsters, I expect that the INE submitted the total population of youngsters, including students. 

I presume that yhe Eurostat data measures against the population of youngsters that have a job or want a job.

To give you a complete picture, I show the data of the Eurostat, which is updated until Q2 of 2011. Here is visible how devastating the unemployment is under female (45.3%) and especially male (57.2%) youngsters. 

Eurostat: Spanish unemployment females per age group

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Eurostat: Spanish unemployment males per age group

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It cannot be expected that the Spanish unemployment – as showed in the Eurostat data – dropped in Q3. To the contrary, I expect this data to be even higher for Q3

All in all, the Spanish unemployment data looks extremely bad; whether you look at the official unemployment figures or the Eurostat data.

While the Spanish budget deficit and the financial problems of some Spanish banks attract most interest from the financial markets, these unemployment figures are the true killers of the Spanish economy. And it doesn´t look like these are going to change very soon.

People that have more precise data on the Spanish labor force, please feel free to react and to correct my data. Thank you in advance!