He Government assumes the stagnation of the reduction of the unemployment rate and, although he has raised his forecasts for the growth of the Spanish economy for the period 2024-2026, he calculates that the unemployment rate will be 11.2% this year, 10.3% in 2025 and 9.7% in 2026, a tenth above the forecasts made last July, when presenting his macroeconomic table. This was announced this Tuesday by the Minister of Economy, Carlos Body, who also announced that the number of affiliates would reach 22 million by the end of 2025.
According to the new forecasts presented by the minister, the unemployment rate will be one tenth higher in the next three years than what the government had predicted in July. In its previous macroeconomic table, the Executive predicted that the unemployment rate this year would be 11.1%, and that it would decrease to 10.2% in 2025 and 9.6% in 2026, as shown in the following graphs.
In this way, the government assumes that the labor market will perform less well than expected a few months ago, before the summer. According to Body, job creation will continue at a good pace and by the end of 2025 there will be 22 million Social Security members.
Meanwhile, the Minister of Labor, Yolanda Diazmaintains its plan to approve a reduction of the working day to 37.5 hours per week and, more than likely, a further increase in working hours. minimum wage from next January. These are two measures that business leaders have already warned will have consequences for employment, particularly in small businesses.
The deterioration in the unemployment rate forecasts occurs in the context of an improvement in economic growth forecasts, based mainly on the successive improvements in GDP approved by the National Institute of Statistics (INE). In total, the Spanish economy has now recorded an overall growth of 1.1 points more since 2019, which represents an improvement of 36.4 billion in nominal terms. Spanish GDP is now approaching 1.5 trillion euros.
