The National Institute of Statistics (INE) has recently integrated data from the 2021 Population and Housing Census into the Active Population Survey (EPA) for the past three years. This update has led to a review of labor market data for those years, compared to the previous use of the 2011 census. With the updated census data showing an increase of 337,600 people living in family homes, several key indicators of the labor market in the past year have experienced changes.
One significant change is in the number of employed individuals, which reached 21,389,700 at the end of last year. This represented an increase of 142,800 workers compared to the previous EPA calculation. However, despite this increase, there was a slight discrepancy between initial estimates and actual job creation numbers for 2023. Only 749,000 new jobs were created instead of 783,000 as previously estimated.
The number of active people and the unemployment rate also saw slight adjustments. The total number of active individuals increased to 24,250,600 while the unemployment rate rose from 11.76% to 11.8%. Despite this rise in unemployment rate, there was a decrease in the total number of unemployed individuals in 2023 compared to previous calculations – by 220,800 people.
Overall, these updates indicate that there was an increase in both active and employed individuals with new population figures but improvements were more significant in previous years with increases falling slightly below expectations for