We look at Spain's February jobs report.
Led by services employment, all sectors except agriculture showed employment growth. The olive crop, the main determinant of winter farm jobs, was very small owing to drought conditions over the growing season.
Service jobs comprise 80 per cent of new employment versus the sector's 68 per cent weight in the total economy. The obvious doubts about productivity should be weighed against the likelihood that many of these new posts reflect surfacing from the large underground economy.
Construction employment is still about two-and-a-half million off the peak - a peak it will never see again. And industry continues to disappoint, if not actually get worse.
Extrapolating (with the usual caveats about that practice) from recent data, services employment will surpass pre-crisis levels in August of this year.
In fact, as we suggested above, productivity seems to be decreasing. But employment figures suggest a repeat of Q4's 0.7 percent GDP growth.
Urged on by the government incentive of drastically reduced contributions, self-employed social security affiliations were the first to go positive back in mid-2013. However, since the beginning of 2014, the growth rate of the number of new
autónomos has stagnated or decreased. Salaried employment gains, on the other hand, appear to be maintaining an uptrend.
The percentage share of part-time work over total employment appears to have stabilized or is decreasing slightly.
The percentage share of temporary contracts is increasing. This, given the incentives in Spanish labour legislation, is to be expected in an economic upturn from a low employment base.
Javier García Echegaray and Charles Butler.
