Spain sees joblessness double in a year

Spanish unemployment soared above 4m during the first quarter, official figures revealed yesterday, with the country's jobless rate rising to 17.4 per cent at the end of March.

Spain's unemployment is now running at more than double the European Union average, with more than 800,000 people joining the dole queues in Madrid, Barcelona and Cadiz in the first three months of the year.

The rise was the biggest quarterly increase since the country’s National Statistics Institute started recording unemployment figures in 1976. The hike in the jobless total between January and March was greater than that in the EU’s most populous country Germany, which has double the number of residents.

The speed of the collapse of Spain’s economy has been breathtaking. Until early last year the country was booming on the back of a buoyant construction sector, but it has now slumped into its deepest recession for more than half a century. The Spanish housing market, which was one of the country’s biggest employers, has fallen for 12 consecutive months and has shed thousands of jobs.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s administration has sought to shore up Spain’s ailing economy with more than €50bn of reflationary measures. Mr Zapatero has also replaced his former finance minister, Pedro Solbes, who argued that Spain could not afford the package of stimuli, which includes proposed increases in unemployment benefits.