5778100 and still rising. 1737900 households where nobody is working. Unemployment in Spain is above 25% for the first time ever and it would be churlish not to acknowledge the key role played by that important labour market reform we got earlier this year. Still, with temporary contracts only taking around 90% of those few new jobs being created, there's clearly still everything to play for.
4 comments:
Why do we bother to study economic history when we absolutely refuse to learn any lessons from it? You don't worry about debt in times of high unemployment; the top priority should be creating jobs. I have listened to Paul Krugman for about the past 10 years and he's always right. Unfortunately our governments are listening to the ghost of Ronald Reagan.
In some ways life would be easier if it was just Reagan's ghost we had to listen to. To unlearn all of the hard learnt lessons of the past we've had to return to the 1920's or earlier.
We are approaching 6 million unemployed now in Spain. Who's to blame, Zapatero's incompetence or Rajoy's hard line measures?
A government which came to power claiming they knew the solution to the crisis can't put the blame for 6 million unemployed on their predecessors. The figures speak for themselves, Spain's economy was doing significantly better a year ago than it is now. A policy of cutbacks and tax increases was always going to have this effect and only the most dogmatic were, and still are, immune to the evidence of decline.
On it being the product of Zapatero's incompetence you can argue that his government should have done something to deflate the property and construction bubble. The funny thing is that few of those who are so critical of him actually did that before 2008. Rajoy also has his share of responsibility there. He was a senior, albeit largely invisible, minister in the administrations that fueled that bubble in the first place.
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