The European Commission takes the labor market out of the ICU. The decrease in unemployment in Spain has led the community government to remove the “critical” label from the employment situation in Spain. However, it maintains the ‘yellow card’ because employability data is still several points below the European average and it is the country with the most unemployment in the EU. Brussels continues to detect weakness in some of the labor indicators, such as employment and unemployment rates, long-term unemployment and GDP per capita.
“The Spanish labor market has improved significantly, but continues to face challenges,” says Brussels in a report on social convergence. Despite still being five points below the European average, the employment rate “increased substantially to 70.5% in 2023,” recalls the community government. “This was due to strong economic growth, strong expansion of employment of people born outside the EU and an increase in employment in trade, technical and scientific professions and job creation in the public sector,” explains the Commission. . This has led the community government to lower the alert from “critical” to “weak but improving.”
Although the macro data depict a kind of ‘Spanish miracle’, with growth above the European average that has allowed the country to escape the stigma of the financial crisis, in Brussels they still paint the box corresponding to the risk rate in red. of poverty that Spain has. A figure that is already high in the European Union as a whole: 23% of the population. And one in four children faces poverty. But the data are more worrying in the Spanish case: the figures increase to 26.5% and 34.7%, respectively.
“This can be attributed in part to problems of adequacy and coverage of the social protection system, regional disparities in access to public services and persistent in-work poverty,” notes a European Commission report. The percentages have been slowly declining over the last decade. In 2014, a third of the population was at risk of poverty. Despite the implementation of concrete measures to improve the situation, such as raising the minimum wage or the Minimum Living Income, Spain is the country where policies aimed at intervening in this reality are the least effective. The reduction in Spain stands at 26%, compared to the 44% average in the European Union.
The risk of poverty is critical for other EU countries, such as Greece or Latvia, while the rating is weak but with improvements in Bulgaria and Romania. Brussels also places Estonia, Luxembourg and Hungary under the microscope. Community sources admit that there is still a lot of work to do: “We have the goal of lifting 15 million out of poverty by 2030 and now we are at 1.6.”
Another of the boxes that appears in red for Spain in the report that analyzes the Social Convergence Framework corresponding to 2023 that the European Commission published this Wednesday is the early school leaving rate, which stands at 13.7% compared to the 9.5% of the European average. “The related regional disparities remain significant despite reducing in 2023, with especially high levels in the south and east and downward trends in the south and the Canary Islands,” explains Brussels. This problem is shared by Germany, Hungary and Romania.
On the contrary, Spain is above the European average in the development of digital skills, education for children under three years of age or the employment gap for people with disabilities.
Regarding housing, which is one of the usual warnings from Brussels regarding Spain due to the high price of rents or the lack of affordable housing, the analysis places it at the European average. And, although it is one of the main concerns on the continent, community technicians see a certain improvement as prices have fallen in some member states due to the interest rate cycle, although these same sources warn that there is less investment in the housing supply.
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