The positive results of the second quarter of this year ensured that, after four years, the number of unemployed to fall back for the first time below the level recorded at the beginning of this legislature. But the number of jobs is still far below.
The data on trends in the labor market promise to dominate much of the political debate until the elections. The monthly unemployment data published by the INE, with significant revisions from month to month, had already been the subject of controversy, and now, the decline recorded in the second quarter is expected to pull the various parties of their arguments that make reading the results.
The comparison between the situation in the second quarter of 2011 (when the troika came and the current government took office) and we are witnessing now will have a prominent role in this debate .
The unemployment rate was 12.1% in the second quarter of 2011. He emphasized the upward trend already recorded before in the following quarters, reaching a historical high of 17.5% in the first quarter 2013. From there began, with some interruptions through down, now falling to 11.9%, a lower value than the starting point of 2011. According to figures from INE (using the criteria official calculation of this indicator) there are now 620,000 unemployed in Portugal, 38 000 less unemployed than there were when it came to troika .
When you look at the number of employees, there It was found that has not yet returned to the levels of the past. In the second quarter of 2011, there were 4.799 million employees and by the first quarter of 2013 that number dropped uninterrupted and very sharply. Disappeared during this period 445 000 jobs.
Since the beginning of 2013 until now there has been a recovery, especially for this last quarter. 226,000 jobs were recovered (over 100 thousand in the second quarter of 2015). The balance of the last four years but continues to be negative, with a loss of 219,000 jobs.
How do you explain that during the same time period, register a reduction in unemployment in surveys detected INE while the number of jobs decreases?
There are several reasons for this phenomenon. One of the main is the very rapid decrease in population residing in Portugal. Over the past four years, according to estimates by the INE, there were less 212 thousand people in Portugal. Part is due to the greater number of deaths than births and elsewhere corresponds to a negative net migration. This trend also continued in the second quarter of 2015 with a further reduction of 11 thousand people in the population.
The largest number of immigrants (and less immigrants) contributed to make it possible in the last four years reduce unemployment without creating more jobs.
Another reason is the increase in the number of inactive population, which grew by 45,000 people since the arrival of troika . For this data contributes an aging population, but also an increase in the number of unemployed people stopped looking for (in the reference period of the surveys) active jobs. They are called discouraged, amounting to 243 000 people in Portugal, a number that has increased by more 40,000 over the past four years. In the last quarter fell by about 14,000.
There are also other 243,000 people who are out of the number of unemployed because they have a partial employment, despite claiming to want to have a full time job. It’s called underemployment, which now affect over 36,000 people over the past four years. In the last quarter this indicator decreased by about 9000.
In short these phenomena over the last four years, the labor force decreased by 257,000 and the inactive population rose by 45,000, which accounts for the difference evolution between employment and unemployment.
In the second quarter of 2015, he returned, after two consecutive quarters of rising unemployment, to a positive trend in the labor market. The unemployment rate fell to 11.9%, down 1.8 percentage points from the previous quarter, which represents the most positive development of this indicator since at least 1998.
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