(…)The euro-zone jobless rate rose to 9.5% in May from an upwardly revised 9.3% in April, the highest level since May 1999 and 2.1 percentage points higher than in May last year, the European Union’s Eurostat statistics agency said.
The increase was stronger than the market consensus estimate of a rise to 9.4% from a Dow Jones Newswires survey of economists last week. April’s jobless rate was also revised up from 9.2% reported last month.
Eurostat said 273,000 people joined unemployment queues across the euro zone in May, bringing the total number of jobless to 15 million, more than the entire populations of Austria and Ireland combined.(…)
At the current rate of increase, the jobless rate looks increasingly likely to surpass the European Commission’s upwardly revised euro-zone unemployment forecast in the next few months. In May the commission raised its forecast for unemployment at the end of the year to 9.9% from 9.3% and said it expected it to rise even further to 11.5% in 2010.(…)
Eurostat said Spain, where a slump in construction led to record economic contraction in the first quarter, posted the highest unemployment rate in the EU at 18.7%. The lowest rates were recorded in the Netherlands with 3.2%, followed by Austria at 4.3%, it said.
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