The precise proportion of the unemployed in Portugal who failed to find a job was 61.1% - against an EU average of 64.0%. The proportion who did find a job was 21.7% - compared to an EU average of 17.7%.

A further 17.2% of the unemployed in Portugal in the third quarter shifted to economic inactivity in the fourth, the Eurostat figures show.

Greece topped the list of EU member states in which most people remained unemployed at 94.8%, followed by Croatia at 85.8% Slovakia at 84.3%, Bulgaria at 77.6% and Lithuania at 77.4%.

At the other end of the scale, fewer than half of the unemployed in Denmark, at 45.9%, were still jobless in the fourth quarter. In Italy the figure was 49.9%, in Finland 52.5% and in Sweden 53.3%.

Compared with 2014, the proportion of people who re-entered the labour market in Portugal after a spell classed as unemployed increased by 2.8 percentage points in the fourth quarter, against 1.5 points in the EU as a whole. The proportion of the unemployed in Portugal who remained jobless fell 3.7 points against a 2.8-point fall for the EU.