Unemployment in the Eurozone region rose to a record 10.4 percent in December of last year. Spain was the hardest hit of the 17 countries at 22.9 percent unemployment while Austria has the lowest unemployment rate of 4.1 percent.
Guillaume Menuet, economist at Citigroup, said he expected the number of people out of work to increase throughout 2012.
“If you think about the direction of employment expectations that you see across various business surveys, the outlook for employment doesn’t look particularly enticing, simply because the uncertainty is very high. In many cases you find firms continuing to delay investment projects. For those that are still making profits, hiring is being frozen, and for those which are under pressure to hit results or losing money, job losses are becoming the only solution that they have,” he said.
Source: BBC News