LISBON: The last six months has seen Portugal’s hotel and restaurant sectors shed almost 53,000 jobs representing an accumulated fall of 17.5 percent over the last two quarters, AHRESP, the sector’s association, reported.
AHRESP requested the National Institute of Statistics to provide the specific statistics for its sector following Wednesday’s report of a 0.2 percent year-on-year rise in Portuguese unemployment to close the first quarter on 13.7 percent, up 0.4 percent on the close of 2014.
In turn, the institute reported that the first quarter of this year had been little better than the final period of 2014 when some 29,400 jobs were lost. “We estimated that our sector would again fall in this first quarter. And it did – to 249,100 jobs. hence seeing the destruction of 52,900 jobs, 17.5 percent of the total labour force in the restaurant and hotel sectors between the end of the third quarter of 2014 and the first quarter of 2015. We are talking of six months of total catastrophe,” AHRESP director José Manuel Esteves told Lusa.
