Spain jobless rate creeps back after summer boost

(MENAFN- AFP) Spain's jobless queue lengthened slightly in August as the summer hiring boom tailed off but the indicator was stronger than a year ago, government figures showed Tuesday.

The number of people in Spain registered as unemployed crept up by some 8,000 to 4.43 million in August compared to 4.42 in July, the figures from the employment ministry showed.

August usually sees a rise in registered unemployed as temporary summer hires end.

But in a sign of economic strengthening, the number of registered unemployed fell by more than 270,000 last month compared to August 2013, the ministry said.

The registered unemployed list is a different measure from the benchmark quarterly unemployment rate published by the national statistics institute.

The institute recorded 5.5 million unemployed in Spain in June, yielding an unemployment rate of 24.47 percent.

That was lower than the previous quarter but still one of the highest rates in the developed world, second only to Greece in the eurozone.

The high figure reflected the lingering impact of the busting in 2008 of a building boom, which sparked five years of stop-start recession in the eurozone's fourth-biggest economy.

Spain emerged timidly from recession in mid-2013 and in the second quarter of this year posted its strongest quarterly growth since 2007, expanding by 0.6 percent.