Spain predicted to have the highest unemployment out of all OECD countries by 2009
The 10.7% unemployment rate predicted next year in Spain will place it at the top of the list of OCDE countries with regards to the number of unemployed in these countries.
This prediction, included in the annual report on Employment Prospects by the Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development (OCDE), is based on the slowdown in the creation of new jobs and is quite far from the average 6% unemployment rate for the rest of the OCDE countries.
It is expected that the unemployment rate will reach 9.7% this year (2.2 million people) and will rise to 2.5 million next year which is above the rate in Turkey, predicted to have an unemployment rate of 10.5% in 2009. In fact, together with Ireland, unemployment is expected to rise significantly in Spain in 2008.
Slovakia comes immediately after Turkey in terms of the number of unemployed in relation to the active population (9.
6%) followed by Portugal (7.9%), Greece (7.7%), France (7.6%), Hungry (7.6%), Germany (7.4%) and Belgium (7.2%).
On the other hand Holland with an unemployment rate of 2.7% followed by Norway (2.8%), South Korea (3.1%), Mexico (3.6%), Denmark (3.7%), Japan (3.8%), Switzerland (3.8%) and New Zealand (3.8%) are all at the opposite end of the list.
In global terms the authors of the study calculate that this year there will be a million more unemployed in all the 30 countries in the OCDE, to which another 2 million will be added in 2009. These figures can be understood in relation to the development of the US economy where the unemployment rate is predicted to rise above the 4.6% registered last year (7.1 million) to 6.1% in 2009 (9.5 million).
The biggest increases in the unemployment rate apart from Spain will be in Iceland, Ireland and Turkey while it is expected that it will go down in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia.
The OCDE predicts that the creation of new jobs will slowdown from 1.5% last year to 0.7% this year and will reduce even further to 0.5% in 2009.
The study also found that various countries would experience a net destruction of jobs (Hungary, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand and the US) while Spain and Ireland would experience a drop of more than two percentage points. In Spain job creation will go down from 3.1% last year to 0.7% this year and to just 0.3% in 2009. However, this will be countered by changes in the number of unemployed in relation to the number of the active population which will drop from 2.3% to 1.5%.
The report also showed that the difference in employment levels between men and women has gone down by 1.5% over the last 10 years while no change has been registered in countries like the US or Finland over the same period.
