Simon Hunter
THE RANKS of the unemployed fell by 79,900 people in Spain in 2022 compared to the year before. That was a decrease of 2.6%, according to the latest figures from the National Statistics Institute (INE).
Over the same period, 278,900 jobs were created – an increase of 1.4% on the previous year – most of which were taken up by foreign workers.
Both of these figures were an improvement on 2020, the year that the coronavirus pandemic hit and dealt a severe shock to the Spanish economy.
That year saw the worst figures for unemployment and occupation since 2012, when the country was being rocked by the consequences of the global financial crisis and the bursting of the property bubble.
But the latest data is a far cry from 2021, when 840,700 jobs were created and unemployment fell by 600,000 people.
At the end of 2022, the unemployment rate was at 12.87%, just 0.4 percentage points below the figure in 2021 but the lowest end-of-year figure since 2007.
Just over three million Spaniards were out of work at the end of last year, with 20,463,900 people employed.
The Economic Affairs Ministry stated that job creation slowed in the last quarter of 2022 ‘in line with the slowdown of the global economy’.
The INE figures also showed that the number of home workers fell by 1.7 million in the last quarter of 2022 compared to the same period the year before, as employers encourage staff back to the office now that the coronavirus pandemic is seemingly under control.
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