Yeah it's fucked up. Luckily my region has the lowest unemployment at 10% (which is still high, but we're kind of OK), because we didn't base our economy on housing and we have a strong services and industrial sector. We also have manage our own taxes without intervention from the Spanish government which is good.

But some areas in Spain have over 30% unemployment!!! Basically, the whole Spanish economy was based on housing, not education or anything useful. Also, 60% of the immigration in Europe was coming to Spain, which meant about 7-8m extra people in 10 years (from 39 to 46m). These people are mostly unemployed now but of course they wouldn't leave the country.

Edit: I don't live in Spain BTW, left the country 6 years ago and I'm not coming back any time soon.

Exactly. Many have been saying this all along. If and when Spain gets it's act together and people work as long as for example the UK, their economy will be one of the best in the world.

This in theory, ( and in normal circumstances) gives them much more potential growth than in the UK or USA where people already work pretty much flat out.

@Argh_College

You may just be jumping from the pan into the fire. The US economy may look a little better now compare to others... which isn't saying much.

The clever people know the price paid to achieve this short term improvement in an election year, so no big surprises there. Obama needs to get himself re-elected. Expect the bad news after the elections, regardless of who wins.

This is a misconception, we work here the same or more hours than in most countries, the problem is that we aren't as productive.

You could be right. According to The Office for National Statistics, figures from Dec 2011 shows the British on average work almost 43 hrs a week in comparison to Spain's 38.4hrs.

What I should have said (and to a certain degree meant although I didn't put it across well)  is that your work hours are out of sync with the EU and that is the reason you are probably not productive.

One of your policticians, Ignacio Buqueras, said that the challenge is to get Spain to adopt more rational hours and adapt to the reality of the European environment.

Are you considered ''unemployed'' if you don't work but you go to school?

No, it's out of work and education.

I never understood why Spain took so many migrants in such a short time. I think those 7 milion came in only 10 years while Spain still had a relatively high unemplyment (8-12% if you believe EU stats). Can you explain this to me?

The short explanation is that, while unemployment was relatively high at 10% (not that high for Spanish standards BTW), Spain's economy was almost exclusively based on housing, so more and more unskilled people were needed to work for construction companies and such. Therefore the government allowed (or even promoted) millions of unskilled immigrants to come and do the job.

While the bubble lasted the unemployment rates kept going down while those millions of people were coming (down to 7%), meaning Spain was creating a majority of jobs in the whole EU. Once the bubble burst...

The government was incredibly stupid in thinking this would last forever. Even a monkey could see it coming, I saw it coming from miles away, before the crisis hit. Now that these jobs are gone for good, there market is simply not ready to employ people with no skills, education, etc. Even if you do have skills and a good education most of Spain's economy wasn't based on that, so skilled people are leaving the country.

Very, very sad.

'tis what happens when you have a rampant social welfare state without the economy to back it.

Hopefully they get their government spending and labor laws under control. Once they do that, I am sure they can make a strong recovery. BTW Troll_Whisperer, where did you move to once you left Spain?

It's not like this is particularly surprising... Spain has had ridiculous unemployment for a long time now.

Although one thing to consider is that Spanish unemployment is in general greatly overexagerated because it has a HUGE "off the books" labor market where people still collect unemployment benefits while working part time jobs.