Social justice

Greece's jobless rate fell to 16.1 percent in February compared to a downwardly revised 16.2 percent reading in the previous month, data from the country's statistics service ELSTAT showed on Thursday.

It was the lowest jobless rate since June 2011.

Hundreds of thousands of workers in Balkan countries have lost their jobs due to economic hardship caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, official statistical data show. And many fear the real numbers of job losses could be considerably higher, as not all countries in the region have compiled comprehensive records.

The loosening of anti-epidemic measures will not directly affect employment and the unemployment will continue to rise for at least two more months, the Bulgarian Chamber of Commerce predicts. More significant involvement of people is only expected at the end of the year.

In March 2020, the month when COVID-19 containment measures began to be widely introduced by Member States, the euro area seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate was 7.4%, up from 7.3% in February 2020. The EU unemployment rate was 6.6% in March 2020, up from 6.5% in February 2020. These figures are published by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union.

In March 2020, the unemployment rate increased by 0.7 percentage points compared to the one registered in the previous month, reaching 4.6 percent from 3.9 percent, according to the data published by National Institute of Statistics (INS) on Thursday.

In 2019, the year before COVID-19 containment measures were widely introduced by EU Member States, unemployment rates continued to vary widely across the NUTS 2 regions of the EU's 27 Member States.

Spain's unemployment rate rose to 14.4% in the first quarter of 2020, the National Statistical Institute INE reported today, Reuters reported.

In the previous quarter, unemployment was 13.8 percent - the lowest since the third quarter of 2008, but still the highest for the euro area countries after Greece.

The rate of unemployment dropped last year to 3.9 pct, from 4.2 pct in 2018, and unemployment affected to a greater degree the graduates of lower and medium education, for whom the unemployment rate stood at 6.3 pct and 4 pct, respectively according to the National Institute for Statistics (INS) figures published on Wednesday.

The world is on the brink of a hunger pandemic as the coronavirus continues to spread, World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley said on April 21.

Greece's economy will contract by about 5.0 percent to 9.0 percent this year under baseline and adverse scenarios, hit by lockdown measures to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus, an influential think-tank forecast on Wednesday.