The year 2023 has closed with excellent labor market benefits. It ends with 783,000 new jobs, bringing it to over 21.24 million jobs, while unemployment drops to 11.76%.
The figure that best illustrates the good behavior of employment during the past financial year is precisely this job creation. The 783,000 new jobs almost triple those created the previous year, and it can practically be awarded the record category. It is true that in the historical series there are two years with superior results, but one was in 2021, emerging from the pandemic, and the other in 2005, when the extraordinary regularization of emigrants took place, so they exceeded last year’s figures for exceptional reasons. If you focus on the years before the pandemic, the difference is also important, they are 783,000 in 2023, against an average of 400,000 between 2014 and 2019.
In this way, the figure recorded yesterday in the Active Population Survey (EPA) certifies the resilience of the labor market throughout 2023, in a complex international context and overcoming forecasts that pointed to a brake on growth.
The other big figure for the year is also positive. 2023 closes with 193,400 fewer unemployed, which brings the unemployment rate to 11.76%, the lowest at the end of a year since 2007, and overall since the third quarter of 2008. It assumes, in addition, chaining three quarters below 12%. If the year began with a total number of unemployed well over three million, it has closed with a much lower number, 2.8 million.
It should also be taken into account that the unemployment rate would have fallen even further if it were not for the dramatic increase in the active population, which has added 590,000 more people. More people are working or actively looking for work, which therefore prevents the unemployment rate from falling even further. But it is, at the same time, good news, in the sense that it is a symptom of the growing expectation of finding a job.
Most of the jobs created in 2023 came from the private sector, more than 91% of the total, with 715,900 new employees, and only 9% from the public sector. If this sector is the one that made the greatest effort during the pandemic years, it is now being taken over by the private sector. From the Ministry of Economy, they emphasize the reduction of the temporary rate to 16.5% and also that more than half of the employment created during the past year was for women, 56%, with an increase of 437,200 employed, against 345,800 men.
“A year that has been surprising for the resistance of employment, for its ability to continue growing, despite not very favorable circumstances,” says María Jesús Fernández, senior economist at Funcas.
The Minister of Economy, Carlos Cuerpo, stated that this EPA shows the “excellent behavior of the labor market”, capable of “continuing to reduce the unemployment rate” and of “reducing the number of families with all unemployed members below the million”. He also added that it “demonstrates the strength and resistance of the recovery of the Spanish economy in a delicate international context”.
If we focus on the last quarter of the year, the EPA indicates that unemployment decreased, which was reduced by 24,600 people, but, on the other hand, employment was lost. Specifically, 19,000 jobs were destroyed, a negative, but nuanced figure. On the one hand, this period at the end of the year is usually irregular in job creation; for example, in 2022, between the summer and the last three months of the year, many more jobs were destroyed, four times more. And, on the other hand, if the seasonally adjusted data is examined, that is to say, separated from the calendar effect, an increase in employment of 0.6% is recorded.
As for what comes from now, analysts are cautious because, since the pandemic, some indicators have surprised them and they have not yet been recalibrated. However, the calculation is that the rate of job creation will moderate. It should also be taken into account that lower economic growth will have an influence, since it will go from 2.4% of the GDP with which it is expected to close in 2023 to close to 1.5% that is forecast for the current one. An added factor for this moderation of a labor market that, for now, remains resilient.
