Euro zone February unemployment jumps, showing pace of slump

Unemployment in the euro zone jumped more than expected in February to 8.5%, data showed today, underlining the speed of economic deterioration a day before the ECB meets on interest rates.

Joblessness in the 16 countries using the euro rose from January's upwardly revised 8.3% of the workforce, Eurostat, the European Union's statistics office, said.

Economists had expected a level of 8.3% for February and said the unemployment rate was likely to reach 10% this year as the economic crisis deepens.

"This will dampen down wage and inflation pressure and if the ECB needed any more confirmation to cut rates, then this is it," said Sunil Kapadia, economist at UBS.

"We expect a 50 basis points cut on Thursday and we think that will probably be the floor given that market rates will be close to zero at that point. But we do expect at some point further measures," he said.

March unemployment data for the euro zone's biggest economy, Germany, and the euro zone PMI index provided a glimpse of what lay ahead for the euro zone.

Germany suffered its biggest jump in unemployment in March since the outset of the global economic crisis with the jobless total rising for a fifth straight month, Federal Labour Office figures showed on Tuesday.

The higher-than-expected German March jobless rise of 69,000 month-on-month in seasonally adjusted terms was the sharpest in over four years.

The euro zone PMI index showed job losses surging in March and the employment sub-index sank to a record low in the survey's near 12-year history.

Eurostat said the number of euro zone jobless in February rose by 319,000 to 13.486 million and by 478,000 to 19.156 million in the whole of the 27-nation European Union.

"February's very sharp rise in euro zone unemployment provides further confirmation that a consumer recovery is only a distant prospect," said Jennifer McKeown, economist at Capital Economics.

She noted that of the total rise in jobless of just over 2 million, 1.6 million had occurred in the last six months. "(This) is an unprecedented rate of deterioration," she said.

Among euro zone members, Ireland and Spain saw the biggest increases in unemployment in February, both up 0.7 percentage point to 10.0% and 15.5% respectively.

Unemployment rose in all euro zone countries for which data was available except the Netherlands, where it stayed at 2.7% for the seventh month in a row.