By Angus Berwick
MADRID (Reuters) - More Spaniards moved abroad in the first half of this year than at any point since the country entered a long economic downturn in 2008, statistics show.
Although the Spanish economy has rebounded to grow faster than most other countries in the euro zone, close to 51,000 Spaniards packed their bags, nearly as many as left during the whole of 2010, in the depths of the country's debt crisis, the figures from the National Statistics Institute showed.
The mass of people leaving Spain marks a near 30 percent increase on the first six months of the previous year.
The number of Spaniards returning home also rose, but net migration of Spaniards widened to nearly 28,000. The bulk of the emigrants are of working age, between 25 and 44 years old, the report on Spain's population said.
The top destination was Britain, attracting more than 6,000 Spaniards in the first half, followed by France and Germany.
High immigration is controversial in Britain and is likely to be a major issue in the referendum on Britain's EU membership that Prime Minister David Cameron has promised by the end of 2017.
Spaniards have been driven to look abroad by falling wages, job insecurity, and a youth employment rate even higher than Greece's, despite Spain's emergence from recession in mid-2013, with GDP growing by 0.8 percent in the third quarter of this year.
Over the last four years average monthly wages for those aged between 16 and 24 fell by 12 percent, and those between 25 and 34 by almost 5 percent, according to a November report from the statistics office.
The tendency of working-age people to move abroad feeds into worries about Spain's ageing and declining population, which hit a new milestone on Wednesday when it recorded more deaths than births in the first half of this year.
(Additional reporting by Sarah White; Editing by Ralph Boulton)
