Spain’s first quarter unemployment rises to more than 14 per cent
Spain’s unemployment rate rose for the first time in a year on Tuesday, as the reverberations from the Covid-19 pandemic begin to reveal themselves in the data of one of the world’s hardest hit countries.
The unemployment rate rose to 14.4 per cent in the first quarter of the year, the National Statistics Institute reported, a result of the lockdown measures that brought much of public life to a halt.
In the final quarter of 2019, unemployment stood at 13.78 per cent.
Analysts caution that the full impact of the crisis on the labour market in the euro area’s fourth-largest economy is not expected to become apparent until the second quarter.
In 2013, the unemployment rate hit 27 per cent in the aftermath of the financial crisis, but the number has steadily trended downward since.
In Spain, where more than 23,000 people have died from the new coronavirus, residents have been under strict stay-at-home orders since mid-March.
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The government began to slowly ease the restrictions over the weekend when children aged up to 14 were allowed to leave the house with one parent again for one hour a day and within 1 kilometre of home.
