Anexo Paper – La "década perdida" de la Unión Europea
Informes de Organismos Internacionales (selección y resumen)
Eurostat – Main statistical findings (Datos disponibles a febrero de 2016)
Unemployment trends
At the beginning of 2000, above 20 million persons were unemployed in the EU-28, corresponding to 9.2 % of the total labour force. The unemployment trend at that moment was downwards. In the second quarter of 2001 the number of unemployment persons had dropped to 19.6 million and the unemployment rate to 8.7 %. A long period of increasing unemployment followed. At the end of 2004 the number of jobseekers available for work reached 21.1 million, while the unemployment rate was 9.2 %.
At the beginning of 2005 a period of steadily declining unemployment started, lasting until the first quarter 2008. At that time, EU-28 unemployment hit a low of 16.1 million persons (equivalent to a rate of 6.8 %) before rising sharply in the wake of the economic crisis. Between the second quarter 2008 and mid-2010 the unemployment level went up by more than 6.6 million, taking the rate up to 9.7 %, at that time the highest value recorded since the start of the series in 2000. The decline of unemployment in the following three quarters was a deceptive sign of an end of the crisis and of a stable improvement in labour market conditions in the EU-28. In fact, since the second quarter 2011 and until the first quarter of 2013 unemployment steadily and markedly increased taking it to the record level of 26.4 million, corresponding to a record rate of 10.9 %. Since then the rate has started to decrease, reaching 9.9 % at the end of 2014.
The unemployment rate in the euro area (EA-18) followed roughly the same trend as in the EU-28. However, between 2000 and the beginning of 2004 the unemployment rate in the euro area was below that recorded in the EU-28. This pattern was subsequently reversed as, between 2005 and the beginning of 2008, unemployment declined more rapidly in the Member States which do not yet have the euro. As in the EU-28, during the economic crisis unemployment increased at a considerable pace, with the exception of the period between mid-2010 and mid-2011 where it temporarily declined. The unemployment level peaked at 19.2 million in the second quarter of 2013, before going down in the second part of 2013 and in the course of 2014.
In 2000, the unemployment rate in the United States was around 4 %, considerably lower than in the EU. It remained much lower until early 2008, when unemployment started to increase rapidly. By the beginning of 2009 the unemployment rate in the United States had reached the same level as in the EU-28, and stayed above the EU-28 rate until the beginning of 2010. Since then the US unemployment rate has followed a downwards path which has taken it to 5.7 % at the end of 2014. In Japan, between 2000 and 2014, unemployment rates were much lower than in the EU, ranging between 3.5 % in the fourth quarter 2014 and 5.4 % in the third quarter 2009, when the rate started declining.
Youth unemployment trends
Youth unemployment rates are generally much higher, even double or more than double, than unemployment rates for all ages. As for the rate for the total population, the youth unemployment rate in the EU-28 sharply declined between 2005 and 2007, reaching its minimum value (15.2 %) in the first quarter 2008. The economic crisis, however, severely hit the young. From the second quarter of 2008, the youth unemployment rate has taken an upward trend peaking in 23.8 % in the first quarter 2013, before receding to 21.4 % at the end of 2014. The EU-28 youth unemployment rate was systematically higher than in the euro area between 2000 and mid-2007. Since then and until the third quarter 2010 these two rates were very close. Afterwards the indicator moved more sharply in the EA-18 than in the EU-28, first downwards until mid-2011, then upwards until the end of 2012. In the middle of 2012 the euro area youth unemployment rate overtook the EU-28 rate, and the gap increased until the end of the year. The gap became even larger in the second part of 2013 and during 2014, when the rate for the euro area went down less than the rate for the EU-28.
High youth unemployment rates do reflect the difficulties faced by young people in finding jobs. However, this does not necessarily mean that the group of unemployed persons aged between 15 and 24 is large, as many young people are studying full-time and are therefore neither working nor looking for a job (so they are not part of the labour force which is used as the denominator for calculating the unemployment rate). For this reason, youth unemployment ratios are also calculated, according to a somewhat different concept: the unemployment ratio calculates the share of unemployed for the whole population. Table 1 shows that youth unemployment ratios in the EU are much lower than youth unemployment rates; they have however also risen since 2008 due to the effects of the crisis on the labour market.
Youth unemployment
In December 2015, 4.454 million young persons (under 25) were unemployed in the EU28, of whom 3.057 million were in the euro area. Compared with December 2014, youth unemployment decreased by 426 000 in the EU28 and by 229 000 in the euro area. In December 2015, the youth unemployment rate was 19.7% in the EU28 and 22.0% in the euro area, compared with 21.2% and 23.0% respectively in December 2014. In December 2015, the lowest rates were observed in Germany (7.0%), Denmark (10.3%) and the Czech Republic (10.9%), and the highest in Greece (48.6% in October 2015), Spain (46.0%), Croatia (44.1% in the fourth quarter 2015) and Italy (37.9%).
Informe de la Fundación FOESSA y Cáritas: Expulsión y recuperación económica (análisis y perspectivas) – Abril 2016
Tendencias sociales y del empleo en el mundo (2016) – OIT – Mayo 2016
World Employment Social Outlook – Trends 2016 – OIT
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