The recession which followed the Global Financial Crisis was second in severity only to the Great Depression of the inter-war years in the 20th century. It has been uncharacteristic of the traditional economic cycle which would see recession followed by a period of strong economic growth and higher employment. This recovery has been much more shallow and unemployment in many regions has remained very high/
In the EU, unemployment within the 18 nations that share the Euro has remained stubbornly high at 11.8%, only marginally below the 12% high-water mark that was hit in February 2013. It remains extremely variable within the bloc ranging from 4.9% in Austria to 26.7% in Greece. The picture in the wider EU is better with an average unemployment figure of 10.5% (March 2014 data).
The European Commission (EC) has marginally improved its economic forecast for the EU’s 28 states for 2014. It is now predicting that the EU will see economic growth of 1.6%; 0.1% above its forecast of February 2014. The EC has declared that “the recovery has taken hold” -25.7 million unemployed EU citizens may take issue with this statement, of course. For the Eurozone bloc, the EC forecast remains unchanged at 1.2%.
On the employment front, the EC expects that the situation will improve as the year goes by with EU unemployment falling back to 10.1% and Eurozone unemployment dropping to 11.4% - the major drag on the Eurozone being the extreme levels of unemployment in Greece and Spain (26.7 and 25.3%, respectively).
Equally, growth within the Eurozone will be patchy. It is expected to be led by German growth, predicted to come in at 1.8% with France and Italy (the bloc’s second and third largest economies) seeing growth of 1 and 0.6% respectively. The EC expects that inflation will remain low, predicting a figure of 0.8% for the Eurozone for 2014.