Brussels (AFP) – The unemployment rate in the euro zone has fallen to a historic level, official data revealed on Tuesday, with employment recovering in Europe despite the outbreak of the Omicron.
The European Union’s official statistics agency, Eurostat, reported that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate reached 7 percent last month, the lowest level since the agency began recording the rate in April 1998.
The unemployment rate in the European Union, which includes 27 countries, including countries such as Poland that are not part of the euro zone, fell by 6.4 percent in December, which is also a record low since the data began to be recorded.
EU Commissioner for Economic Affairs Paolo Gentiloni said: “The eurozone ended 2021 – which followed a year of the worst recession since World War II – with the lowest unemployment rate ever, which testifies to the success of our collective response to this crisis.
Before December, the lowest unemployment rates were recorded for the 19 countries that use the euro currency as well as the 27 countries of the European Union in March 2020 and were 7.2 percent and 6.5 percent, respectively.
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Eurostat announced the registration of about 13.6 million unemployed people in the European Union in December, including 11.5 million in the euro area.
The improvement in employment from one year to another was significant, with the number of the unemployed declining by 7.5 percent, which means that the number of people looking for jobs decreased by 1.8 million people.
The situation is quite different from what was the case during the eurozone debt crisis, when the bloc struggled for years to reduce unemployment to pre-crisis levels.
EU officials attribute the difference to a radical change in the bloc’s approach, as the EU jointly agreed to unprecedented spending increases in the worst phase of the crisis, rather than the austerity path it chose in the years 2010-2015.