Brazil’s unemployment rate fell below 10% for the first time since January 2016 to 9.8% in the March-May period, according to official data released on Thursday.
Another drop of 1.4 points
This indicator, calculated in the current quarters, has significantly decreased again, by 1.4 points compared to the previous three months (December-February: 11.2%). The figure announced by the IBGE Institute of Statistics is better than the expectations of the analysts of the economic daily Valor, who expected 10.2%. That figure dropped sharply compared to the same quarter last year, when it reached 14.7%. Covid-19 was still wreaking havoc in the country.
“Thanks to the improvement in the epidemic situation, the promotion of vaccinations and the easing of containment measures, face-to-face (face-to-face) services, which had suffered greatly, began to recover.Adriana Beringay of IBGE explains in a press release. Despite this improvement, Latin America’s largest country still has 10.6 million unemployed. Average worker earnings also fell, falling 7.2% year-on-year in 2021, while annual inflation was 11.7% in May.
Worrying situation
The number of people employed in the informal economy, who therefore most often work without a contract and in precarious conditions, remained very high, reaching 39.1 million during the quarter under review, or 40.1% of the working population. Even if the country’s economic situation remains a concern, the drop in the unemployment rate is good news for President Jair Bolsonaro, who is at a disadvantage at the polls three months before the presidential election. The head of the country noted on Twitter “to create 277 thousand jobs in Mayand that the unemployment rate fell to single digits for the first time in six years. In the latest poll by benchmark institute Datafolha published last week, leftist former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won 47 percent of the vote in the first round of October’s vote, compared to Jair Bolsonaro’s 28 percent.
Source: Le Figaro
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