Portuguese unemployment rate looks gloomy until 2020, IMF warns

The International Monetary Fund has warned that it will take Portugal 20 years for its unemployment rate to drop to the levels recorded before the financial crisis, according to local media reports on Tuesday.

The IMF said that Portugal's 7.6 percent unemployment rate in 2008, when the crisis began, will only be achieved in two decades.

The IMF said that Portugal is lacking economic competitiveness and warned that youth unemployment is very high, leading to the risk of seeing a "lost generation."

Portugal's unemployment rate rose to 13.2 percent in May, from 12.8 percent in the previous month, according to the Portuguese National Institute of Statistics. Youth unemployment rose to 33.3 percent in May from 31.7 percent of the previous month.

Large numbers of Portuguese citizens have fled the country to find opportunities abroad and the country is struggling with a public debt amounting to over 130 percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the general elections approach in Autumn.