BARCELONA, Spain, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The prospects for Spain's labor market remains positive despite recently registering the worst employment figures since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Javier Vazquez, an economist at the University of Barcelona, told Xinhua on Monday.

According to the latest data from Spain's National Statistics Institute (INE), the quarterly unemployment rate went up almost half a percentage point to 12.29 percent in Q1 2024, although the rise follows a year in which Spain was the country that created the most jobs in the Eurozone.

"Consumption of services has gone up, for example in the hospitality sector and tourism, which is good for the Spanish economy, and despite the general uncertainty in the international context, the prospects for job creation and reducing unemployment are fairly good," the economist said.

Last year, Spain registered 616,000 new employed persons accounting for 32 percent of all new jobs created in the European Union (EU), according to the EU's statistics office Eurostat. This result places Spain ahead of the EU's largest two economies, Germany (+371,000) and France (+196,000).

Despite the positive job creation, Spain also recorded the highest unemployment rate in the EU last year, with an average of 12.2 percent, compared to the 6.6 percent average for the Eurozone countries.

"Registering ever larger reductions in unemployment will be increasingly difficult because reducing the rate from 14 to 12 percent is not the same as reducing it from 12 to 10 percent," Vazquez pointed out.

At the end of March, the total number of employed people in Spain fell to 21,250,000, the lowest figure since the first quarter of 2023, reported the INE, while the number of unemployed reached 2,977,900, the highest level since the same period last year.

"The most important issue is to resolve the structural problems of the labor market, which means better aligning the training of especially young people who are entering the job market for the first time and the demand of the companies," the professor added.

Despite the poor first quarter figures, the overall numbers for the past 12 months show that net employment in Spain has gone up by 615,800, with unemployment down by 208,500.

According to Vazquez, the situation could improve this year thanks to continued immigration, which could help "plug the gap between the vacancies that need to be filled and the people who are willing to do those jobs."

The economics professor added that the Spanish authorities could also boost employment with the adoption of policies that "incentivize mobility and the relocation of workers to reduce some of the regional differences in Spain." Enditem

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