Southern European countries remain mired in chronic unemployment eight years after the financial crash.
Labour market data shows that the unemployment rate in the 19-nation eurozone fell to 10.4%.
It has not been this low since September 2011.
But within that percentage there is a great divide between the strongest and the weakest.
German unemployment fell to just 4.5%. The country has managed to create about 33,000 jobs a month on average over the last six years so that by the end of 2015 there were 1,906,000 unemployed people.
The Spanish economy is at last pushing ahead and the jobless rate is beginning to benefit. Although the rate dipped in the course of 2015 to just over one-quarter of the population unemployed – down from nearly one-fifth – there remain 4,751,000 people without work.
Portugal also experienced a significant drop, going from 13.6% at the beginning of the year to 11.8% by the end with 600,000 chasing jobs.
This was just a shade greater than Italy’s 11.4% which dropped only one percentage point despite the reform efforts made by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi who has been trying for two years to transform the indebted economy.
Nearly 2,900,000 people there are in need of work.
Greek unemployment rates have been jammed at around a quarter of the population since 2014. As a result 1,250,000 people need work.
In Finland, unemployment is actually on the rise, ending the year at 9.2%. This was the country’s highest rate since 1998.
The trend has been of declining unemployment for 15 consecutive months, but the rates in the southern eurozone countries have been dampened down by the large number of skilled workers who have emigrated for work in northern countries.
Not enough attention is paid to the seriousness of youth unemployment. The average euro area rate is 22%, itself a worryingly high percentage.
Eurostat estimates that of the 4.454 million young people under 25 without jobs in the EU, just over 3 million, or 68%, are concentrated in the 19 economies of the eurozone.
In Greece and Spain the rate has budged little in the near from near 50%.
The only other countries significantly above the 22% average were Italy (38%), Cyprus (32%), and Portugal (31%).
