In March, one in five persons in Spain was unemployed, while in Latvia one in six was without a job. Since the beginning of the year, unemployment in Spain advanced by about one percentage point every month, and compared to March 2008, the jobless rate has almost doubled (17.4 percent in March 2009 compared to 9.5 percent year-on-year. As such, unemployment in Spain, Latvia and Lithuania, at 17.4 percent, 16.1 percent and 15.5 percent, respectively, is closing in rapidly on that registered during the Great Depression in the 1930s, when unemployment reached some 25 percent.
Romania is among the last in this list, with a jobless rate of 5.8 percent, but data reported for this country is in fact for the last quarter of 2008. Data provided by the National Employment Agency (ANOFM), unemployment in Romania stood at 5.6 percent in March, 0.3 percentage points higher than in February. Furthermore, compared to March 2008, the jobless rate rose 1.5 percentage points (to 5.6 percent in March 2009 from 4.1 percent year-on-year). It should be mentioned that the methodology used by Eurostat for calculating unemployment differs from that of ANOFM.
