Chile reducing unemployment, albeit slowly
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Loading... - Elias Toro
- 01 Jul 2022
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Chile's National Institute of Statistics (INE) Wednesday released a report showing a 7.8% unemployment rate for the March/May 2022 quarter, a 0.1% turn for the worse when compared to the February-April period, although, overall, nearly 96% of the jobs lost during the COVID-19 pandemic have been recovered.
INE Director Sandra Quijada insisted over 813,000 jobs had been recovered in the last twelve months. when the total number of people with a paid job grew 10.1%, driven by commerce's 13.2% improvement and a 34.6% growth in lodging and food services. Household keeping also rose 30.1%.
Unemployment in Chile has thus recorded its thirteenth consecutive drop, an annual decline of 2.2 percentage points, given that the increase in the labor force was 7.5% and was lower than the increase in the number of employed persons, which reached 10.1%. Meanwhile, the number of unemployed individuals decreased by 16.5%.
In Santiago's Metropolitan Region, home to 7.1 of Chile's 19 million inhabitants, the unemployment rate for the quarter reached 8.3%, a decrease of 3.1 points over twelve months.
The unemployment rate among women stood at 8.5%, decreasing by 1.8% in a year, while the participation and occupation rates stood at 49.8 and 45.6%, respectively. However, INE's document showed that in 12 months, the volume of work, measured through the total number of practical hours worked by employed persons, rose 16.6%; in addition, the average number of weekly hours grew 5.9%, reaching 38.5 hours.
Quijada highlighted that “with respect to the lowest point observed in 2020, there was an accumulated increase of 1,777,876 employed persons at the national level, recovering 95.9% of the occupations that were lost at the worst moment of the pandemic”.
During the May/July 2020 quarter and under a strong sanitary lockdown, unemployment had reached 13.5%, almost five points higher than the 7.9% recorded in the same month of 2018, and 7.5% in 2019. Read More...
