Yahoo News Greece: Youths Worst Hit As Unemployment Rises
Greece's army of unemployed continued to grow with the latest figures showing nearly three in 10 Greeks out of work, most of them youths.
Figures published by the Hellenic Statistical Authority put unemployment at 26.8% in March, a 0.4% rise over the previous month and a 19.7% surge from the same period last year.
The country's youth remain the hardest hit.
Just over two in 10 Greeks aged between 20 and 24 had a job, according to the survey, with 77.4% of those surveyed either jobless, unable or unwilling to work, said Stelios Zacharias, the director of Greece's statistical authority.
News (NasdaqGS: NWS - news) of the gloomy findings, polled from a pool of 30,000 households nationwide, sent fresh shock waves across the country, already reeling from years of brutal budget cuts.
Throughout the day pundits and politicians took to television and radio talk shows, trading jabs over the effectiveness of austerity, three years after European and international creditors stepped in to save the Greek economy - and the euro - with multibillion-dollar rescue loans.
Government officials refrained from any comment.
In a striking admission this week, the International Monetary Fund confessed to major missteps in its handling of Greece's first bailout in 2010, the first spark in a debt crisis that has since spread to other European nations and threatened bigger economies like Spain and Italy.
In the 50-page report titled "Greece: Ex Post Evaluation of Exceptional Access Under the 2010 Stand-By Arrangement", the IMF concedes it bent or broke three out of four of its own rules with the lending programme to make Greece's yawning debt seem sustainable.
Worst yet, the report says, the fund badly underestimated the damage that its prescription of austerity would wreak on the Greek economy and unemployment.
Greece, it said, may have instead benefited from less stringent fiscal targets, or targets spread out over a longer period. That, however, would have required billions more in bailouts, an alternative for which "support clearly did not exit".
Well into the throes of its worst financial crisis since World War Two, the Greek economy has been shrinking for six consecutive years, with no end in sight, wiping out a decade of growth.
Still, facing a 4bn euro (£3.3bn) financing gap starting from next year, Greece will need to find savings by increased tax collection or added measures. Experts fear this could force more people into unemployment and cause them to leave the country.
Greek emigration to Germany alone shot up by 40% in the last year, while 120,000 of the country's professionals - mainly doctors and academics - have left Greece since the start of the crisis in late 2009.
"There may be a bounce back,” Filio Kontzamani, a 23-year-old hair dresser, said. "But I don't want to wait around until then.
"I'm considering Copenhagen."
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