Italians, Spaniards and Greeks are forsaking their homelands and heading over the Alps to the more robust economies of Germany and Switzerland, as economies contract across the Mediterranean.
By Nick Squires, Rome, Fiona Govan in Madrid and Jeevan Vasagar in Berlin
In Greece, the unemployment rate is now 26.4 per cent, the highest in the euro zone, with youth unemployment at a staggering 58 per cent.
Spain has the euro zone’s second highest rate of unemployment, with 26.3 per cent of people now out of work, while Cyprus’s relatively modest rate of 14 per cent is expected to rise sharply in the wake of the devastating contraction of its financial sector, a condition of the country receiving a massive bail-out by international creditors.
In Italy, new figures released this week showed that there are now nearly six million people without jobs, out of a population of around 60 million.
Italy’s employers’ organisation warned at the weekend that the country has lost a full percentage of GDP in less than two months thanks to the political paralysis in the country following inconclusive elections in February.
“No matter how much we both worked in Rome, the money was never enough,” said Grazia Bonsignore, 46, a translator and teacher, who moved with her husband from Rome to Zurich two years ago in search of more secure contracts and better paid work.