1768 - Comparison of unemployment in the 80’s & in the actual crisis in Spain

Abstract

This study has been made in order to see the effects of the 80’s and current crises on unemployment and compare them. Even if there are abundant studies about the issue of unemployment during times of crisis there are almost no studies comparing the effects of both crisis. The main purpose of this paper is to compare the effects of the 80’s and the current financial crisis in terms of unemployment at different levels in the economy; national level, sectorial level, gender level and regional level. For this study we obtained the quarterly data from INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadistica) and transform it into yearly data. The indicators used were activity, employment and unemployment. What we found is that there is no significant difference in terms of national unemployment, with only 0.54% more unemployment in the 80’s. The difference between these two crises is reflected at a sectorial level, where each crisis has seen more affected the sectors related to the nature of each of the crises. The participation of women in the labor market has help decreasing gender differences. At a regional level we have seen that the divergence among regions has increased a 7.91% during the period. We can conclude that although the difference among these crises is not significant at a national level, their effects were very different in the various regions and sectors in the economy.