Eurozone: about half of the 6.5 million unemployed and not seeking work are Italians

About a half of the disheartened people of the Eurozone, those who are no longer even seeking work, lives in Italy. In its Labour Force Survey for 2013, Eurostat takes a gloomy picture of the labour market in Italy where, even before jobs, the missing thing is the hope of finding one. Over three million 91 thousand Italians aged between 15 and 74 – as per Eurostat data – are unemployed and are not even seeking work: striking figures, about half of all the discouraged unemployed of the whole EU18 area.

Almost all the other European countries see very different figures: the economically inactive population are about one million in Spain, almost 700,000 in Poland and 549,000 in Germany. In the Eurozone, the total number of unemployed people not seeking work is 6,400,000 – in the EU28 they are 9,300,000.

Yet, those not even seeking work are not the only plague of the European labour market, even those who are employed suffer for several problems. Among the 216,400,000 EU workers in 2013, no less than 43 million 700 thousand workers had a part-time job. Sometimes a choice, sometimes a necessity, yet about 10 million European citizens (23 percent of part-time workers) are underemployed: they wished to work more hours and were available to do so. In the EU18, underemployed are about 6 million 800 thousand – 22.1 percent of part-time workers.

The highest percentages of underemployed part-time workers are recorded in Greece (72 percent), Spain (57.4 percent) and Portugal (45.9 percent), while the lowest are recorded in the Netherlands (4.2 percent), Luxembourg (10.3 percent) and Czech Republic (11.4 percent).