The labor market in Spain, 2002–2018 Updated

Aggregate issues

The Great Recession hit Spain in 2008 after the longest period of expansion in its economic history (1994–2007). As in many other EU countries, the Great Recession in Spain consisted of two consecutive recessions. The first recession (second quarter of 2008 to fourth quarter of 2009), triggered by the international financial crisis, was followed by a short-lived recovery and then a second recession (fourth quarter of 2010 to second quarter of 2013), unleashed by the eurozone crisis. These two recessionary periods, as established by the official timing of recessions of the Spanish Business Cycle Dating Committee, are shown with shaded areas in all figures.

The Spanish double-dip Great Recession has been by far the longest since 1975, when General Franco died after 36 years of dictatorship and the transition to democracy began. The effects of the external negative shocks on the economy were aggravated by the bursting of a big housing bubble along with a large-scale banking crisis and subsequent reduction of bank credit to firms. Additionally, Spanish labor market institutions, often labeled as dysfunctional, consisted of dual employment protection legislation and a rigid collective bargaining system. This combination caused the labor market to adjust to negative shocks mostly through dismissals. In this context, employment contraction and unemployment growth were more dramatic during the Great Recession than in any of the previous crises for which data are available.

Figure 1 shows the aggregate unemployment, job-separation, and job-finding rates from 2002 through 2018. The job-separation rate is computed as the number of non-working individuals who had a job in the previous quarter expressed as a share of all employed individuals in the previous quarter. Analogously, the job-finding rate is the number of working individuals who were out of work in the previous quarter expressed as a share of all employed individuals in the previous quarter. Note that the two rates are comparable because they are both computed as a share of the same group of individuals (those who were working in the previous quarter), and the difference between the job-finding and job-separation rates is the net employment growth rate. Quarterly values were then averaged over each year to obtain annual values, as is the case with all the labor market quantities shown in this article.

Unemployment almost reached 19% at the end of the first recession, peaking at about 27% in early 2013. It has been on the decline since then. Moreover, since 2014, the job-finding rate has been higher than the job-separation rate, which implies that new jobs were created. In particular, employment has grown at an average annual rate of 2.4% since 2014. However, the share of the working-age population in employment stood at 49.7% in 2018, 4.7 percentage points below its pre-crisis rate, representing a jobs deficit of 1.252 million. By 2018, aggregate unemployment was still at 15.3%, about 7 percentage points higher than it was in 2007. The high level and pronounced volatility of the unemployment rate is not a new phenomenon, as this marks the third time that it rose above 20% in less than 30 years.

Further reasons for concern can be found when dissecting this aggregate scenario, as long-term unemployment reached unprecedented levels in the aftermath of the Great Recession. According to the standard definition in Spain, unemployed individuals who have been actively seeking work for more than one year are classified as long-term unemployed. Figure 1 further distinguishes between the percentage of unemployed individuals, with unemployment spells lasting between one and two years, and the very long-term unemployed, with spells lasting more than two years. The share of individuals who have been unemployed for one to two years peaked in 2010 at about 26%, while the percentage of very long-term unemployed individuals kept rising until reaching 44.2% in 2015. In 2018, 34.9% of all unemployed individuals (and 5.3% of the labor force) had been out of a job for more than two years, almost three times more than shortly before the Great Recession. Such pervasiveness of long-term unemployment stands out from a historical perspective as well as internationally, with the Spanish long-term unemployment rate being the second largest in the EU (after Greece).

Long-term unemployment in Spain disproportionally affects older and less-educated workers [1]. Moreover, there is a negative relationship between the probability of exiting unemployment and the duration of unemployment spells, so finding a job becomes increasingly harder for long-term unemployed individuals. Hence, Spain's high levels of long- and very long-term unemployment entail a risk of social exclusion for the affected individuals, and getting them back to work is a crucial challenge for policymakers.

The demographics of unemployment: Age and gender

Figure 2 shows another troublesome aspect of the Spanish labor market: its huge rate of unemployment among youth, which is far from being a new phenomenon [2]. Youth unemployment rose dramatically throughout the Great Recession, peaking at 55.5% in 2013, and has been on the decline since then. However, by 2018, youth unemployment was still at 34.3%, almost twice its 2007 pre-recession level.

The dual nature of the Spanish labor market, in which temporary contracts with low firing costs and open-ended contracts with high firing costs coexist, likely helps to explain the strong volatility of youth unemployment over the business cycle. Indeed, from peak to trough, the unemployment rate increased by 37 percentage points among young individuals, whose rate of temporary employment is also higher, against a 17 percentage point increase among their prime-aged counterparts.

Despite the fact that the ratio of young to prime-aged unemployment has remained fairly stable since the 1990s in Spain, the concentration of unemployment among youth in several countries (notably in Southern Europe) has been one crucial driver of the increasing divergence of unemployment rates across Europe [3].

Along with the aggregate and youth unemployment rates, Figure 2 also presents the unemployment rates of adult men and women. The unemployment rate of adult women has always been above that of men, and the unemployment gender gap was already decreasing before the Great Recession, during which it reached its minimum of 0.5 percentage points in 2012. However, the unemployment gender gap started widening again after 2012, and by 2018 it was somewhat higher than in 2008.

Labor force participation: Aggregate, by gender and by age

In contrast to the strong counter-cyclical behavior of unemployment, the aggregate labor force participation rate (Figure 3) continued on its upward trend in the aftermath of the international financial crisis. It peaked at 60.4% in 2012 and barely fluctuated thereafter, such that by 2018 it was only slightly lower than in 2007.

However, this aggregate pattern masks interesting gender differences. Figure 3 also shows that, since the Great Recession started, there has been both a reduction in men's labor force participation, which fell by about five percentage points between 2007 and 2018, and an increase in women's labor force participation, which in 2012 peaked at around 54% and in 2018 was close to four percentage points higher than shortly before the crisis. As a result, the gender gap in labor force participation has narrowed markedly from 19.9 to 11.5 percentage points between 2007 and 2018. While this has been the case for most OECD economies, Spain has experienced the strongest convergence over this time period.

The gender gap in labor force participation has fallen for all age groups since 2007, but further analyses by age reveal other stark differences. In particular, the rise in women's labor force participation was largest among women aged 55 and older, while the participation rate for men in this age group experienced a much smaller increase throughout the recession. The pattern was similar for prime-aged individuals. In contrast, participation fell for both young women and young men, although the reduction in participation was more pronounced for men.

These labor force participation patterns by gender and age suggest that, in the wake of the Great Recession, the “added worker effect” is likely to have been at play for adult women. In other words, adult women's labor supply may have increased as a response to their partners’ job losses and the associated reduction in household income. In contrast, the “discouraged worker effect” (withdrawal from the labor market because of failed searches and dim prospects) may have played a role for young men, given the pervasiveness of youth unemployment and the unprecedented levels of long-term unemployment. In this context, it is worth stressing that, during the crisis, many job losses in Spain were concentrated in male-dominated sectors, in the construction sector in particular, while sectors with more female employment generally fared better. In particular, the contribution of the construction sector to total employment dropped by almost half between 2008 and 2018 as it fell to 6.3%, while the percentage of male versus female workers in this sector hovered around 92% through the same period. In contrast, in the service sector, employment grew from about 68% to 75.5% between 2008 and 2018, while the percentage of female versus male workers remained fairly stable at around 53–54%.

Employment composition: The share of temporary jobs

Figure 4 shows the percentage of employees who have a temporary job in order to illustrate the most visible symptom of the dual nature of the Spanish labor market. Before the Great Recession the overall share of temporary jobs was above 30%, almost three times the OECD average, with temporary employment being more prevalent among women and youth. After its 2006 peak of almost 33%, the rate of temporary employment declined to its lowest point, dipping below 24% at the end of the second recession. This decline illustrates that job destruction during the crisis was disproportionally borne by temporary workers. Since then, the rate of temporary employment has rebounded, but, at 26.8% in 2018, it was still below its pre-crisis level. Interestingly, the gender gap in temporary employment narrowed until almost closing in 2015. By 2018, the gender gap in temporary employment appeared to reopen, but it was still almost two percentage points smaller than at the beginning of the recession.

In stark contrast with the decline of the overall rate of temporary employment during the Great Recession, the share of young temporary employees sharply increased during the same period; in 2018, it was 71.2%, almost 9 percentage points above its 2007 level. The rate of part-time employment also increased dramatically among youth during the crisis, as it escalated from 21.2% in 2007 to its peak of around 40% at the end of the second recession. By 2018, it was still as high as 37.3%.

While both part-time jobs and temporary jobs provide flexibility to employers and employment opportunities for certain labor force groups, some concerns remain. In the case of part-time employment, it seems it is becoming increasingly involuntary, as in 2018 54% of part-time workers declared they were in part-time employment only because they could not find a full-time job (against 32% in 2007) [4].

Regarding temporary contracts, in Spain, as in other OECD countries, many young people enter the labor market through this form of employment. However, Spanish youth tend to stay on temporary contracts much longer than elsewhere and face frequent unemployment spells between one temporary contract and the next [5]. Indeed, Spain's transition rates from unemployment or temporary employment into permanent employment are among the lowest in the OECD [6].

Immigration before and after the Great Recession

During the pre-crisis expansionary phase, Spain received large inflows of immigrants who substantially modified the country's demographic structure and joined its labor force. Immigrants, however, were hit particularly hard by the Great Recession [7]. Figure 5 shows the percentage of immigrants in the working-age population, in the labor force, and in the total employed population, all of which were on a rapidly rising trend before the recession. The share of immigrant employment peaked in 2008 at almost 14%, before markedly declining thereafter, reaching a low of 10.6% in 2014. The percentage of immigrants in the working-age population and in the labor force peaked in 2009, one year later than the share of immigrant employment, and by 2018 they had slightly rebounded. In contrast, the share of immigrant employment started growing again after 2014, albeit slowly.

In sum, job destruction during the crisis was disproportionally borne by foreign workers, who were over-represented in the sectors that were hit hardest by the recession, and, as a consequence, Spain has experienced net migration outflows since the beginning of the 2010s [8].

Wage developments

Before going into detail on wage developments please note that in this and subsequent sections inflation is accounted for in order to capture changes over time in the economic well-being of workers. To this end, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is used to deflate nominal wages and to obtain real wages.