Youth unemployment at 40% despite largest drop in EU

Greece’s youth unemployment was at 40.8% in October, despite the optimism generated by a new report by Europe’s statistics agency Eurostat on Wednesday showing the largest drop in unemployment within the EU.

According to Eurostat, Greece’s unemployment rate fell from 23.3% in October 2016 to 20.7% in October 2017, but still remains the highest in the European Union given that the average unemployment rate in Europe is 7.3%.

The unemployment rate was 9.7% and 8.2% in the Eurozone and the EU, respectively, in December 2016.

There were 17.961 million unemployed people in the EU and 14.137 million unemployed in the Eurozone in December 2017. In Greece, the number of unemployed people totalled 990,000.

In the Eurozone, youth unemployment was 17.9% and in the EU 16.1% in December.