By Beln Carreo
MADRID (Reuters) – Unemployment in Spain rose again in April, pushing the number of people depending on benefits to a record 5.2 million as one of the world’s strictest coronavirus lockdowns brought the economy to a halt.
The number of people in Spain registering as jobless rose by 7.97% in April from a month earlier, or by 282,891 people, leaving 3.8 million people out of work, the Labour Ministry said on Tuesday. The number of registered jobless people had risen in March by 9.31%.
The cost of the benefits paid to the 5.2 million people fully or partly depending on unemployment benefits in April skyrocketed 207% from a year earlier to 4.5 billion euros.
Including furloughed workers and people on medical leave, as many as 7 million people are depending on the state, almost 30% of the working population, according to data that Spain has sent to Brussels with economic forecasts for 2020.
The figure of fully unemployed people, at 3.8 million, is still far from the record 5 million reached in 2013 at the trough of the financial crisis that hit the country a decade ago.
(Reporting by Joao Manuel Mauricio and Beln Carreo; Editing by Inti Laudauro and Angus MacSwan)
