Unemployment, for its part, registered a new decrease of 50,268 people, up to a total of 2.68 million unemployed throughout Spain. It is the lowest figure in the last 15 years, but it is still one of the highest rates in the entire European Union, according to data published this Tuesday by the Ministries of Labor and Social Security. However, the rate of decline has slowed, since the usual thing before the covid was for unemployment to drop substantially more. The 2014-2019 average was about 103,494 people.
Will unemployment continue to fall in the second half or will it pick up? It will depend on various factors, although historically the second semester is usually worse than the first. In 2019, before the covid, unemployment rose by 147,919 people in the second half of the year and fell by 186,611 people in the first. In 2022, that ratio was -42,929 unemployed in the second half and -225,323 unemployed in the first.
The evolution of hiring will be key. Part of the slowdown can be explained by the improvement in the stability of employment. In other words, as there are more permanent contracts, the weight of storms has decreased and this makes the evolution of hiring more explosive. It falls less in periods of crisis and rises less in times of prosperity.
The growing weight of discontinuous fixed, that when they stop being active they are not computed as employed but neither as unemployed, it can also have an effect in the future. And translate into lower affiliates during the second part of the year, but not unemployment.
The unemployment data will also have an influence on the expectations, since the better the perception of the economy and the greater the perceived probability of finding a job, the more people who are not even trying right now will sign up for the unemployment lists. And this will surface new unemployed in the statistics. In the same way, if expectations are bad, people who could sign up may not do so and cushion, in part, the increase in unemployment figures.