FEDEA, the Foundation for Applied Economics Studies, published a new document yesterday in which its director, Angel de la Fuente, points out that “The improvement recorded between 2019 and 2023 or 2024 is considerably smaller in the case of effective unemployment than in registered unemployment. Comparing December 2024 with December 2019, for example, registered unemployment has decreased by just over 600,000 people, while effective unemployment has only decreased by 72,000.”
So, in terms of “effective unemployment,” the situation is that “we are more or less where we were,” FEDEA explains. “The apparent improvement would simply be due to the fact that we have stopped counting as unemployed many people looking for work who, before the reform, were temporary and are now permanent-intermittent.”
De la Fuente admits, as the Second Vice-President, Yolanda Díaz, maintains, that “it is true that permanent-intermittent workers in this situation have never been counted as registered unemployed,” but he clarifies that “before the reform, there were very few of them, and now there are many more. Their greater weight creates a distortion in the statistics that should not be ignored.”
