Unemployment fell to 11.2% in Brazil and returned to the pre-pandemic level

Rio de Janeiro, 18 Mar The unemployment rate in Brazil was 11.2% of the economically active population in the quarter ended in January, the lowest for this period in the last six years, returning to the level it had before the crisis generated by the pandemic, the Government reported this Friday. Although it grew slightly compared to 11.1% measured in the December quarter due to the termination of temporary contracts that Brazil traditionally opens for the holiday season, unemployment in the quarter ended in January fell by more than three points compared to the same period last year (14.5%). It is also more than three and a half points below that recorded in the first quarter of last year (14.9%), when unemployment reached its record level in Brazil as a result of the crisis generated by the pandemic, according to data released today by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). Despite the sharp decline in the unemployment rate in the last year caused by the resumption of activities and the economic recovery of Brazil after the pandemic, the largest economy in South America still has 12 million people unemployed. The current number of unemployed, however, is 6.6% lower than in the quarter ended in October last year, which means that Brazil generated 859,000 new jobs in the last quarter. Compared to the quarter ended in January 2021, the number of unemployed people fell by 18.3%, from 14.7 million to 12 million, which means that 2.7 million Brazilians got new jobs in the last year. The generation of new jobs allowed the number of Brazilians in employment to reach 95.4 million in January, with growth of 1.6% (1.5 million new workers) compared to the immediately previous quarter and 9.4% compared to the quarter ended in January 2021 (8.2 million new workers). This recovery was mainly driven by formal hiring, which raised the number of Brazilians in formal employment from 31.7 million in the quarter ended January 2021 to 34.6 million in the quarter ended January of this year, equivalent to an increase of 9.3% (2.9 million new workers in employment) formal). The number of informals in the private sector rose by 19.8 per cent in the last year, to 12.4 million, and the number of self-employed persons (self-employed) by 10.3 per cent, to 25.6 million. Despite this, the informality rate in the Brazilian labor market rose from 39.2% in the quarter ended in January 2021 to 40.4% in the same period this year. The recovery of the labor market is attributed by economists to the recovery of the Brazilian economy itself, which grew by 4.6% in 2021, its greatest expansion in a decade, after falling by 3.9% in 2020, its biggest retraction in more than two decades, as a result of the crisis generated by the pandemic. But economists themselves believe that this strong rate of recovery will not continue and that the Brazilian economy will suffer a slowdown in 2022, by the time they expect growth of 0.49%, which calls into question the continued recovery of the labor market. This is because the Brazilian economy is threatened this year by high inflation, high interest rates, the uncertainty generated by next October's presidential elections and the effects of the war on Eastern Europe.