Catalonia creates 75,000 jobs in a year

Some 75,000 jobs were created in Catalonia in 2018, according to figures from the Spanish statistics institute.

This means that at the end of the year, 451,000 people were jobless in the country, 11.75% of the working population, with 3.39 million people in employment (in December 2017 the figure was 3.31 million).  

The number of unemployed people fell by 5.82% in one year.

In the whole of Spain, the jobless rate was 14.45% at the end of 2018.

Two ways of calculating unemployment

The figures differ from those published in early January by the Spanish labor ministry, which in December 2018 put the total number of unemployed people in Catalonia at 392,000.

The variation in the figures can be attributed to the different methods for gathering data. The Spanish labor ministry figures are based on the number of jobseekers registered with the employment service, while the EPA figures are taken from surveying a broad sample of 65,000 households, or some 200,000 individuals, all over Spain.