RIGA — Latvia’s jobless rate continued to climb, although incrementally, toward the end of 2009, according to data from both the State Employment Agency and the European Union.

Baiba Paševica, director of agency, told Latvian Radio on Friday that the unemployment rate was 16 percent at the end of 2009, up from 15.1 percent in late November.

She said the rate of new jobless was slowing and that there were 30 percent less new registrations over the first few days of 2010 compared with a year ago.

In Brussels, the picture was even bleaker, with Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency, announcing Friday that unemployment in Latvia was 22.3 percent — the highest in the 27-member bloc.

Eurostat uses a broader definition of unemployed and includes those who don’t have jobs, are available to start a job within two weeks, and have actively sought employment within the last month. The result is that the EU jobless figure is normally around 5 percentage points higher than the Latvia figure.

It is worth noting that, according to EU data, Latvia’s unemployment rate is gradually approaching the 25 percent threshold, the level of jobless generally cited for the United States during the Great Depression. Paševica said there were various forecasts for the year, with the optimistic scenario around 15 percent and the pessimistic scenario as high as 20 percent.

“We predict that the unemployment rate will keep rising in the first quarter, but perhaps the growth rate won’t be as steep as in 2008,” she said, adding that the government had to do everything in its powers to avoid the 20 percent scenario.

Paševica said there were currently 139 jobless per one job vacancy in Latvia – or a total 179,000 unemployed and 1,389 job openings.

Meanwhile, EU data showed that the average rate of unemployed in the 27 member countries was 9.4 percent, while the jobless rate in the eurozone was 10 percent – the same level in the United States, according to Labor Department numbers released Friday.