Spain’s unemployment rate has been significantly higher than the rest of the EU for decades. Recently it has dropped down to 11-12% but it has also had long stints of being 20%+ over the past two decades. Spain seems like it has a great geographical position, stable government, educated population with good social cohesion, so why is the unemployment rate so eye poppingly high?
In: Economics
Spain is a country that committed economic suicide by isolation since it’s civil war. Once it came out of its dictatorships, it choose short term profit over long term.
This can be seen on how Spain Focused it’s economy in what ended up being a big bubble in 2008.
As well it’s weather and natural beauty allowed the country to make a lot of easy money off food and tourism. Lately it has become the most touristy country in the planet. This means that employment is highly seasonal and highly unregular, meaning lots of “under the table” payments, that give a false sense of unemployment.
In other words, Spain has invested in a lot of industries that provide disminishing returns and make the country compete with poorer and poorer countries
[deleted]
As mentioned before Spain mostly relies on tourism and isn’t manufacturing country as not much has a label made in Spain and in there are the jobs
Part of this is of course economics, but it should be kept in mind that unemployment rates between different countries are not really easily comparable as how exactly people are counted differs a lot.
The devil is often in the details as in many places people who have been unemployed for long enough are not counted and because some countries will send their unemployed to courses where they will count as “in education” rather than unemployed even if they only take the course or seminar because they are unemployed.
Another big part is that official unemployment figures don’t count people who work unofficially and without involving the taxman.
If you work under the table and don’t tell the government about it, then as far as the government is concerned you are still unemployed.
The amount of under the table work people get up to, differs a lot country by country.
The stats are misleading.
A lot of people which count as “unemployed” in the statistics actually have jobs. Getting unemployment subsidies while working on the side is fairly common. Either straight up 40 hours without contract, or doing trades work “in black”, or semi-legal hustles… there’s a lot of variety, but none of it shows up in the stats.
My family moved to Spain and they said that a large proportion of young Spaniards stay at home with their families and then inherit the house. This means they do not need large amounts of income and therefore do not need to work.
I’m not saying this is accurate but that is their personal experience near Alicante. A huge amount of the young work minimum wage jobs for cash in hand so they appear unemployed. Some just work one day a week and stay at home as opposed to moving out
There is a significant amount of
1) Seasonal work. Some people work 4 months in summer, live the rest of the year with that.
2) Unregistered work. Much of this summer work is done illegally/unregistered, so there is people who work, but are unemployed for statistics purposes.
A guy from Tenerife told me that people qualify for unemployment benefits after they work 9 (or was it 6) months, then they can get payouts for several months. That’s what everyone does, so there’s always a bunch of people who are unemployed by choice. Life there doesn’t cost much.
Latest Answers