Unemployment in Spain Exceeds 25%, Taking Economic Misery to New Levels

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The New York Times
Saturday, October 27, 2012

Unemployment in Spain Exceeds 25%, Taking Economic Misery to New Levels

By RAPHAEL MINDER

MADRID — Though hardly a surprise, Friday’s report that Spain’s unemployment rate had surpassed 25 percent was bad news for a government that recently trumpeted a streamlining of its labor market rules.

The ranks of the unemployed swelled to 5.78 million people at the end of the third quarter, compared with 5.69 million a quarter earlier and 2.6 million four years ago, when Spain’s property bubble burst, the report said.

The jobs data signaled a deepening recession and raised the likelihood that Spain would again miss budget targets agreed to with other euro zone countries.

There was, however, one perversely positive element to the report: the labor picture is so bleak that it could help Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy make the case that Germany and other lenders cannot risk imposing further austerity measures on Spain’s economy in return for providing more European rescue funding.

The dire jobs report “gives Rajoy more leverage in his European negotiations and is good ammunition to ask for more time to adapt,” said Federico Steinberg, an economist at the Elcano Royal Institute, a research organization in Madrid.

Mr. Rajoy, however, is also fighting the crisis at home. Unions have called a general strike for Nov. 14, and elections in Catalonia on Nov. 25 could accelerate that region’s drive toward independence.

Luis Garicano, a professor at the London School of Economics, said the government’s cost of paying unemployment benefits, now almost 4 percent of gross domestic product, was unsustainable. After 20 consecutive quarters of job destruction, he said, “people see very little light at the end of the tunnel, and Spaniards are losing hope.”

The separatist push in Catalonia “is partly a reaction to this lack of hope,” Dr. Garicano said. “It worries me for what it says about what can happen in the next two years, in which we will have a sharp fiscal contraction, low external demand, continuing deleveraging by households and restricted credit to companies.”

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