Spain’s economic expats want to go home: Study

Some 82 percent of Spaniards working abroad want to come home and 67 percent want to do so in the next five years, according to a new study by recruitment agency Hays.

Fewer than one in five Spaniards plan to stay in their new home, Hays' Guide to the Labour Market 2014 also shows. 

The recruitment firm also makes a direct link between an exit of workers from Spain and the country's economic crisis, given that 20 percent of workers surveyed by the company had left the country during the last five years.

Spain's official unemployment rate is 26 percent and millions of jobs have been destroyed since the country's building bubble burst in 2007.

Just over a third (36 percent) of people surveyed by the recruitment firm had left the country because of a lack of opportunities. The next largest group was people who had been offered a more interesting project ,at 28 percent. 

Germany and France were the joint favourite destinations of Spanish workers while the UK came a close third.

Figures from Germany's national statistics office show that the number of Spaniards living in the country rose 16 percent from January 2010 to October 2013, up to 120,231 people. 

More than 51,000 Spanish workers registered with Britain's Social Security in 2013 — a prerequisite for working in the company — an annual rise of over 36 percent and more than from any other country except Poland.

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