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Jobless queues 14,688 shorter in November

A total of 14,688 people left Spain's jobless queues in November, leaving the total number of people registered as looking for work at 4,512,166, official employment ministry figures released on Tuesday show.

Jobless queues 14,688 shorter in November
An unemployment office in central Madrid. Photo: AFP

This is the best November figure since 1996, or since current records began, according to Spain's employment ministry.

Unemployment has risen by an average of 64,000 in November in the last six years.

In seasonally adjusted terms, unemployment queues in November shrunk by 51,308.

In the last 12 months, the jobless rate has come down by 296,792 people, the biggest November-to-November fall since 1998. 

The registered unemployed list is a different measure from the benchmark quarterly unemployment rate published by the national statistics institute.

The institute recorded 5.43 million unemployed in Spain at the end of September, yielding an unemployment rate of 23.67 percent.

That was lower than the previous quarter but still one of the highest rates in the developed world, second only to Greece in the eurozone.

The high figure reflected the lingering impact of the busting of a construction bubble in 2008, which sparked five years of stop-start recession in the eurozone's fourth-largest economy.

Spain emerged timidly from recession in mid-2013 and in the second quarter of this year posted its strongest quarterly growth since 2007, expanding by 0.6 percent.

Spain's economy grew by 0.5 percent in the third quarter compared with the previous three months, its fifth consecutive quarterly growth, according to final figures from the statistics office released on Thursday.

The economy grew by 1.6 percent over the past 12 months, up from the 1.3 percent year-on-year increase registered in the second quarter.

The government predicts the economy will expand by 1.3 percent in 2014 and by 2.0 percent in 2015.

It sees Spain's unemployment rate easing to 24.2 percent by the end of this year and drop to 22.2 percent at the end of 2015.

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