Spain\\\'s unemployment crisis eases: official data

The unemployment rate in Spain fell sharply in the second quarter slipping beneath 25.0-per cent, official data showed on Thursday in a further sign that the country is pulling away from deep economic crisis. The rate fell by 1.45 percentage points and the number of people looking for work fell by 310,400, marking the biggest quarterly fall since the series of statistics began, the data showed. This was the first time the rate had been less than 25.0 per cent, or one in four of the workforce, since the third quarter of 2012. But 5.5 million people are still unemployed in Spain, which is slowly emerging from deep recession following the global financial crisis since years ago which burst a property bubble and threw the country into deep crisis. Unemployment has hit young people in particular, as has been the case in some other crisis-hit eurozone countries, leading European Union leaders to speak of a ‘lost’ generation. However, on Wednesday, the Spanish central bank said that the economy had grown at the strongest rate for six years in the second quarter, expanding by 0.5 per cent from output in the previous three months. The bank also raised its forecasts for output for this year and next, saying the economy would grow by 1.3 per cent this year and by 2.0 per cent in 2015, according to AFP.