The euro zone’s jobless rate rose to record levels this summer, official data showed Monday, underscoring the pain inflicted by the slowing world economy and the euro crisis on citizens of the world’s largest market.
Unemployment in the 17-member euro zone rose to 11.4 percent in August, Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Union reported from Luxembourg. The agency also revised up the figure for June and July to 11.4 percent from the previously reported 11.3 percent, already a record.
The unemployment rate for the 27-member European Union came in at 10.5 percent in August, unchanged from July. The agency estimated that there were more than 25 million people out of work in Europe, including more than 18 million in the euro zone. Eurostat revised up the July figure from 10.4 percent.
“It is clearly unacceptable that 25 million Europeans are out of work,” a European Commission spokesman, Jonathan Todd, told a regular news briefing Monday.
Austria had the euro zone’s lowest jobless rate, at 4.5 percent. Spain continued to have highest, at 25.1 percent, with 52.9 percent of people under 25 years old being classified as unemployed.
The European jobless numbers, which compare with the official August rate of 8.1 percent in the United States, suggest that Europe’s recession is still deepening.
That impression was strengthened by Markit Economics’s purchasing managers’ index, which confirmed an initial report showing euro zone production declining in September for a seventh consecutive month.
Jennifer McKeown, an economist with Capital Economics in London, noted in a report that data show that while the economic strain is being felt most heavily at the “periphery” of the euro zone, in places like Spain and Portugal, “the situation is bad in the core too,” with the French jobless rate at 10.6 percent. Last week the government said the number of jobless had passed 3 million, the first time since 1999.
The data Monday “suggest that the industrial sector is experiencing a sharp downturn,” Ms. McKeown wrote, “and with unemployment at a record high, the outlook for the consumer sector is gloomy, too.”
She estimated that euro-zone gross domestic product would shrink by 2.5 percent next year.
European stock markets were higher in midafternoon trading. The Euro Stoxx 50, a barometer of euro zone blue chips, was up 1.27 percent, and national markets were up between 1 percent and 2 percent. The FTSE 100 index in London was up 1.26 percent.
The euro was at $1.2929, up from $1.2880 late Friday in New York.
By DAVID JOLLY
James Kanter contributed reporting from Brussels.
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