S&P forecasts an unemployment rate in Spain of more than 16% until 2022
The risk measurement agency S&P Global Ratings forecasts that the unemployment rate in Spain will be above 16% until 2022 and will begin to drop from 2023 to 15.8%.
According to the latest S&P report on the economic impact of the coronavirus in the Eurozone and in the United Kingdom, Spain will be the country with the greatest destruction of employment, followed by Italy and France, although in these countries unemployment rates will be between 10% and 11%, five or six points lower than the Spanish.
The risk rating agency foresees a level of unemployment for 2020 of 16.4% compared to 11.1% in Italy; 9.5% in France and 3.6% in Germany, while for 2021 the forecast for Spain worsens to a rate of 16.5%, compared to 12.1% in Italy; that of 9.7% in France, and 3.8% in Germany.
According to S&P, measures to curb job destruction through Temporary Employment Regulation Files (ERTE) filed across Europe will limit unemployment, although it will protect workers differently depending on the sector.
In this sense, highly skilled manufacturing workers will be better protected by these schemes than low-skilled, temporary or seasonal workers in the tourism industry, a sector that is very present in the Spanish economy.
In this way, S&P forecasts that the unemployment rate in Spain will remain above 16% until 2022 and begin to decrease in 2023.
In Italy, the unemployment rate will be around 10.6% in 2022, while in France it will be 9.1%, and in Germany 3.6%.
The report recalls that the Spanish economy will go into recession this year and will fall by 8.8%, although it will rise to 5.1% in 2021.
He notes that the impact is primarily due to a drop in household consumption, which has been severely restricted by government measures to contain the spread of the virus.
