Costa del Sol News: Unemployment rise as Malaga continues to suffer from economic crisis

MALAGA closed 2019 with 10,800 more unemployed, a figure that separates the province from the positive trend marked in the whole of Andalucia and Spain, areas in which declines of 10,500 and 112,400 people have been registered during the last 12 months respectively. According to the official data of the Encuesta de Población Activa that the Instituto Nacional de Estadística published on Tuesday, the province closed the year with 139,800 unemployed,  647,900 workers and an unemployment rate of 17.75 per cent.

The data has been collected at the end of a decade in which the labour market has been shaken by one of the greatest economic crises in history. Both the rebound in the number of unemployed and the current unemployment rate is still considerable measures but they are far from the data recorded, for example, in the first quarter of 2014, when one in three Malaga-born working age was unemployed.

At the beginning of the recession, at the end of 2008, 12 years have passed in which the unemployment rate in the province has not dropped by 20 per cent. Until the third quarter of 2018, the ratio did not lower that threshold. Since then, the unemployment rate has changed between 16.54 per cent registered at the end of the same year and 18.09 per cent in the third quarter of 2019.