Portuguese unemployment rate drops most among Eurozone countries

Portugal's unemployment rate dropped the most among Eurozone countries, according to Eurostat data released on Friday.
The debt-laden country's unemployment rate dropped from 16.3 percent in July 2013 to 14 percent in July this year.
According to the figures, in the space of a year the number of unemployed people dropped by 125,000.
These figures were released just a day after the government said that the unemployment rate is expected to fall from 17.7 percent to 14.2 percent by the end of this year.
However, Portugal's unemployment rate is still overly high, comparing with the average unemployment rate in the Eurozone of 11.5 percent.
The country's high unemployment rate has forced thousands of people to work abroad, and figures released earlier this month by the Portuguese National Institute of Statistics (INE) revealed that Portugal has lost half a million young people, between the age of 15 and 29, in the last decade.
The euro area unemployment rate fell from 11.9 percent in July last year to 11.5 percent in July 2014, with the lowest rates recorded in Austria and Germany.