BRUSSELS: The eurozone\u2019s unemployment rate fell to a historic low in December, official figures showed on Tuesday, as hiring in Europe rode a solid recovery and shrugged off the explosive spread of the Omicron variant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The seasonally-adjusted jobless rate stood at seven percent last month, the lowest level since the official Eurostat statistics agency began its record in April 1998.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the 27-member European Union, which includes countries such as Poland not in the single currency bloc, unemployment fell to 6.4 per cent in December, also a low since records began.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe eurozone ended 2021, the year after the worst recession since WW2, with its lowest ever unemployment rate. A testimony to the success of our collective response to this crisis.\u201d the EU economics affairs commissioner Paolo Gentiloni said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Prior to December, the lowest unemployment rates for both the 19 countries sharing the single currency and the EU-27 were in March 2020, at 7.2 per cent and 6.5 per cent, respectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Eurostat said that some 13.6 million people were unemployed in the EU in December, including 11.5 million in the eurozone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The improvement in the job picture year-on-year was significant, with a drop from 7.5 per cent in the eurozone, or 1.8 million fewer people seeking work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The positive job picture is a marked difference from the eurozone debt crisis, in which the bloc struggled for years to bring unemployment down to pre-crisis levels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
EU officials attribute the difference to a radical change in approach in which the EU jointly agreed on an unprecedented spending push at the worst of the crisis, instead of the austerity path chosen in 2010\/15.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BRUSSELS: The eurozone\u2019s unemployment rate fell to a historic low in December, official figures showed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13458,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"yoast_head":"\n