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Greek Jobless Rate Hits Record 25.4%

As the Greek Parliament was approving a $17.45 billion spending cut and tax hike plan – exempting its own employees – the country’s unemployment rate rose for the 39th consecutive month to a record high of 25.4 percent, showing how difficult Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’ challenge is to right the economy.
The sobering numbers came from Greece’s statistics service ELSTAT and showed that jobless rate in the country is now more than twice the Eurozone average and three times higher than in the United States.
Samaras said the austerity package, that provides for another avalanche of pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions, would enable Greece to get a long-delayed $38.8 billion loan installment from the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB).
The jobless rate has more than tripled since the country’s five-year economic slump began in 2008. It now stands at 58 percent for those aged between 15 and 24 years, compared with 20 percent in August 2008. Greece’s economy is estimated to have shrunk by about a fifth since then. The slump is expected to continue in 2013 when the government is set to take budget cuts and tax increases worth 9.4 billion euros ($11.96 billion) as a condition to receive more funds under its international bailout.
A record 1.27 million Greeks were without work in August, up 38 percent from the same month last year. That doesn’t include as many as 750,000 more whose benefits have run out and have no income. Greece’s August jobless rate was the European Union’s second highest, behind Spain, which was barely ahead, at 25.5 percent has is also suffering a crushing economic crisis.
The European Commission forecast this week that the Greek labor market would bottom out in 2013, with unemployment slipping to around 22 percent in 2014, expected to be the economy’s first year of modest recovery after six consecutive years of recession.

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