Registered unemployment. By activity sectors

Registered unemployment, according to the Ministry of Employment and Social Affairs Order dated 11 March 1985, is unmet demand for employment on the last day of each month at the Generalitat Employment Offices (OTG) in the case of Catalonia, and the SEPE job centres in the rest of Spain, with the following being excluded:

1. Employed workers who are seeking a job, for example, to combine with their current one.
2. Workers who are not immediately available to work or who are disqualified (pensioners, students in formal education aged under 25, etc.).
3. Workers who are exclusively seeking a job with specific features (working at home, for a period of less than 3 months or with a working week of fewer than 20 hours).
4. Temporary agricultural workers receiving the special unemployment subsidy.

On 4 May 2005 the new SISPE (Public Employment Service Information System) management system came into service. It enables enhanced collection of the information used to draw up statistics for registered unemployment and provides statistical data that are of much better quality and much more reliable than previous ones. The SISPE has revealed unemployed people who previously were not correctly classified under the provisions of the Ministerial Order dated 11 March 1985, which regulates the statistical definition of registered unemployment.

The two main changes with the SISPE are:

• cross-referencing with social security registration files make it possible to update changes in the situation of job seekers immediately.
• foreign job seekers are not directly excluded from registered unemployment by the simple fact of being foreign, but instead a check is made, as is done in the case of Spanish people, of whether they meet the requirements to be classified as unemployed.

In short, the introduction of the SISPE changes the number of registered unemployed, not because it alters the definition of who is a registered unemployed person but rather because it improves the updating and computerised handling of the information. Data from prior to 2005 have been calculated by doing retrospective simulations using SISPE standards.

In March 2009, the procedure for adapting statistical information on people looking for work to the new Classification of economic activities 2009 (CCAE-2009) was completed. The information from January 2008 to February 2009 has been reconstructed to facilitate interannual comparison and for all 2009 results to be adapted to the new CCAE-2009.

The information on registered unemployment refers to the last day of each month.

Until 2007 economic activity is classified according to the Catalan Classification of Economic Activities 1993 Revision 1 (CCAE-93 Rev.1). Since 2008, according to the new CCAE-2009.