all depends how you define 'employment' and define 'unemployment' ; and you can define either many ways : living at home and working 14hrs a day in the family farm/shop/business 'unpaid' and therefore avoiding taxes, etc counts as unemployment : but a wife who stays at home, but is listed as her self-employed husbands tax-deductable company secretary counts as employed. In the UK, current policy is to list any unemployed under 18yo as 'not in education' and so take them out of the 'unemployed' figures. Likewise, unemployed people who may have been self-employed before, are not listed as unemployed but as 'low-paid in receipt of benefit', and so dont count anymore. During the Thatcher era, they changed how the unemployment figures were calculated over 20 times, every time, it moved them down.
Both Greece and Spain, and Italy too, still have large family-run small-scale agricultural sectors within which family members are not paid wages, they effectively get all their bills paid and pocket money to spend. Its a system that works well, cheap flexible labour, avoids taxes and maintains family bonds, in fact, all the things the more conservative political elements find laudable. It is pretty standard in less-industrialised nations or regions. It just makes comparing 'employment' figures a bit skewed.
Looking at the number of 'working age' people, then deducting the number listed as employed does produce a figure for 'unemployed', but it dont mean none of them are working...
