Lanzarote had the lowest island unemployment rate in the Canary Islands in the second quarter of 2024. The president of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, Oswaldo Betancort, has stressed the need to "continue working on the diversification of the economy of Lanzarote and La Graciosa, despite the excellent data shown by the latest Active Population Survey (EPA), recently published by the Lanzarote Data Center.
This document, in its analysis of the second quarter of 2024, confirms that the island unemployment rate stood at 10.5%, the lowest percentage in the archipelago, "only observed previously in the buoyant year 2005", according to the first island institution. The EPA places just over 67,600 workers carrying out their activity on the island.
"Of course, we will not change the predominance of the service sector in our economy, on which 89% of workers depend; but the Cabildo of Lanzarote is committed to continuing to delve into creating new employment niches that diversify job creation and also respond to the modernization demands of the tourism industry," the president, and also Minister of Economic Promotion in the Corporation, has remarked. Betancort has pointed to public-private collaboration as one of the fundamental lines of work "to continue being more competitive".
Anticipating market movements
On this matter, the Councilor for Employment of the Cabildo, Ascensión Toledo, has clarified that, within the competential obligations of her area, is to adequately interpret the needs and conjunctures of the island labor market, and "offer the necessary training and collaborative agreements", she noted this Thursday shortly before clarifying how professions related to the environment, health or nutrition, for example, constitute some models of the new service demands that the Corporation must identify.
Both the president of the Cabildo and the Councilor for Employment emphasize that this public management must be maintained, and even intensified in the midst of a very positive employability scenario.
And they have recalled that at the end of 2023, a few months after the entry of the current Government group in the Cabildo, the unemployment rate in Lanzarote and La Graciosa stood at 14.1%. In the second half of 2024, it decreased by almost four percentage points, reaching 10.5%, that is, the lowest rate in the region and also lower than the state average, of 11.27%, according to the EPA.
"Likewise, during that period, this unemployment rate has decreased especially among women, decreasing in what we have been doing this year almost six points and placing itself on par with the male unemployment rate" (10.47H-10.54M), Councilor Ascensión Toledo has remarked.
