MADRID, May 5 — Unemployment in Spain rose again in April, pushing the number of people depending on benefits to a record 5.2 million as one of the world’s strictest coronavirus lockdowns brought the economy to a halt.

The number of people in Spain registering as jobless rose by 7.97 per cent in April from a month earlier, or by 282,891 people, leaving 3.8 million people out of work, the Labour Ministry said today. The number of registered jobless people had risen in March by 9.31 per cent.

The cost of the benefits paid to the 5.2 million people fully or partly depending on unemployment benefits in April skyrocketed 207 per cent from a year earlier to 4.5 billion euros.

Including furloughed workers and people on medical leave, as many as 7 million people are depending on the state, almost 30 per cent of the working population, according to data that Spain has sent to Brussels with economic forecasts for 2020.

The figure of fully unemployed people, at 3.8 million, is still far from the record 5 million reached in 2013 at the trough of the financial crisis that hit the country a decade ago. — Reuters