| Friday, January 1, 2010

The New York Times has published an article on Spain’s soaring youth unemployment rate, which it says has increased from 17.5% three years ago to 42.9% this year.

That would means that the recession has more than doubled the number of young people on the dole in Spain.

The article tries to go into the reasons for the huge increase and touches on some of the important systemic problems that cause so many Spanish youths to end up at unemployment offices in addition to the temporary employment contracts that so many of them were on during the boom years:

Young Spanish workers, like their counterparts in the rest of Europe, face other obstacles like union rules, long-term contracts and legal protections that shelter older workers and discourage new hiring, Mr. Osterman said. “There is a cohort of people who are condemned to a permanently stagnant career path in Spain,” he said. “It’s very worrisome.”

It also notes that the Spanish government’s attempts to solve the problem are largely useless, especially in the weak economic position it finds itself in, with Zapatero’s government now: “spending roughly 30 billion euros a year on unemployment benefits, but the money is doing little to prepare younger workers for the future.“

The NYT suggests that Spain should “invest more heavily in vocational education and retraining, and require the jobless to improve their skills.”

A fine suggestion, but preemptive at the moment. There’s currently no coherent national business plan to replace construction and tourism, so how are all the young people (and the older unemployed) supposed to know what to retrain as?

I was commenting with an American friend before Christmas that Spain, as a society, isn’t particularly entrepreneurial when compared to somewhere like the US (and perhaps the UK). A Russian friend has told me over the holidays that most of her friends dream of owning their own companies or becoming business consultants.

So many young people in Spain still dream of becoming some type of civil servant via the famed public examination system to be selected for a stable, relatively well-paid job for life with great hours and holidays.

It’s easy to see why when comparatively it takes so long to set up a new company here, especially in the recession, and when the private employment market is so plagued with systemic problems.

During last night’s New Year’s Eve TV replays of weird and laughable moments from recent Spanish cultural history, a Spanish comedian in the 1980′s pretended to be on the phone apologising to a friend for having ‘encouraged him to move back to Spain to spend 16 years looking for a job‘.

The systemic youth unemployment problems Spain is facing aren’t new and there’s still no real plan for a sustainable Spanish economy – or sustainable youth employment.