Evolution Of Unemployment In The Eurozone From 1994 To 2013

The creation of the Eurozone at the end of the 90’s had several economical and social consequences for every country members of the common currency. In 2008 when the "Great Recession" began, every member experienced growth rate collapse and all of them entered a recession. Unemployment increased in almost every country. Unemployment is not just an economical indicator, it is a social issue which highly impact people in their lives. From 2009 we can really observe two kinds of situations in the Eurozone. In that we can call the "southern countries", unemployment heavily increased, as in the PIIGS countries( Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) for instance. Meanwhile the opposite tendency appears in the "northern countries" with a stagnation or just a small increase in unemployment. Study the issue of unemployment is important because it reveals the situation of the labor market, pillar of the domestic economy. It also is a indicator of people financial situation.The purpose of this paper is to analyze the variation of unemployment rate in every country of the Eurozone from 1994 to 2013, to understand how high theses rates were, what were the reasons for this, and how the governments solved this major social and economical problem, or at least how they tried. The biggest innovation comes from the statistical sources, data come from every country’s domestic statistics agency and not from Eurostat. The statistical office of the European Commission uses similar calculating methods for every country, what basically is a good thing to standardize data. But high rate differences and some credibility issues affect this agency, and so this is why this paper uses domestic data. After the reading of many reports and articles about the issue of unemployment in the Eurozone, this paper will explain why all these countries encountered different unemployment rates, and why the discussion about the two different areas in the Eurozone is important. The lack of flexibility in the "southern countries’ " labor markets combined with structural issues made them less resistant to the "Great Recession", when "northern countries" resisted to the crisis after having their domestic market reformed. These reforms were not forced as they were in "southern country" and did not lead to international troubles, weakening the Eurozone and the brotherhood between people.