The unemployment rate in the 19 countries that use the Euro as their currency reached 8.1 percent in August, its lowest since 2008, the EU statistical office Eurostat reported on Monday. Photo credit: Pixabay.
Brno, Oct 3 (BD) – Eurostat estimates that, as of August, there are 16.657 million unemployed people in the entire EU-28. Of these, 13.22 million are in the Eurozone. [Eurozone = states where the Euro is the main currency: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain.] Compared with the same month of 2017, the number of unemployed people fell by 1.921 million in the EU-28 and by 1.419 million in the Eurozone.
The average unemployment rate across the entire EU was 6.8 percent in August.
Unemployment rates in EU member states, seasonally adjusted, August 2018 (%). Source: Eurostat.
The lowest unemployment rate was again reported in the Czech Republic, where just 2.5 percent of people aged between 15 and 74 are looking for work. In Germany and Poland, the rate is 3.4 percent.
The highest unemployment rate continues to be reported by Greece. According to the latest figures from Greece from June of this year, the unemployment rate is 19.1 percent.
High unemployment was also reported in Spain, where 15.2 percent of people are unemployed. In Italy, unemployment fell by 0.5%, below the ten-percent threshold to 9.7 percent in August.
The largest year-on-year decreases in unemployment rates were registered in Cyprus (from 10.5 % to 7.5 %), Croatia (from 10.9 % to 8.5 %), Greece (from 21.3 % to 19.1 % between June 2017 and June 2018), and Portugal (from 8.8 % to 6.8 %).
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