(15 April 2014) – Regional unemployment rates varied widely across the 272 NUTS 2 regions of the EU28 in 2013.
The lowest rates were recorded in the regions of Upper Bavaria (2.6%), Freiburg and Salzburg (both 2.9%), Tübingen and Tyrol (both 3.0%), while the highest rates were registered in five Spanish regions: Andalusía (36.3%), Ceuta (35.6%), Melilla (34.4%), the Canary Islands (34.1%) and Extremadura (33.7%).
Among the regions, 49 had an unemployment rate of 5.4% or less in 2013, half the average for the EU28 (10.8%). They included twenty-three regions in Germany, eight each in Austria and the United Kingdom, three each in the Czech Republic and Romania, two in Belgium and one each in Italy and the Netherlands. At the other extreme, 27 regions had a rate higher than 21.6%, double that of the EU28: thirteen regions in Spain, ten in Greece, three French Overseas Departments and one region in Italy.
In 2013, the average unemployment rate for young people aged between 15 and 24 in the EU28 was 23.4%.The lowest rates were recorded in the German regions of Upper Bavaria and Tübingen (both 4.4%) and Freiburg (4.7%), and the highest in Ceuta (72.7%) in Spain and West Macedonia (70.6%) and Epirus (67.0%) in Greece.
In more than three quarters of the EU28 regions, the unemployment rate for young people was at least twice that for total unemployment and the majority of the unemployed had been out of work for at least a year.