First modification: 27/02/2021 – 03:24
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In Colombia, Chile, Brazil and Mexico, the unemployment rate left behind the historical peak that it touched at some point in 2020, but it is still high when compared to pre-pandemic records.
If the pandemic has hit a macroeconomic index hard in Latin America, it is unemployment. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) estimates that some 2.7 million companies have had to close their doors due to the health crisis.
The most recent data reported shows that Colombia, Chile, Brazil and Mexico, although their records have improved, still do not appear to what was reported before the coronavirus spread throughout the region.
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In Colombia, the unemployment rate in January 2021 was 17.3%, which meant an increase of 4.3 percentage points compared to the same month in 2020, when it was 13.0%, according to the data released this Friday February 26 by the Administrative Department of National Statistics (DANE).
A total of 4.2 million people were unemployed in Colombia in the first month of the year, which is 29.6% more than in January of last year, when the country had not yet registered the first case of contagion.
In Chile, unemployment fell slightly to 10.2% in the November-January moving quarter, still affected by the pandemic, which is experiencing a second wave in the country, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE).
The national unemployment rate increased by 2.8 percentage points with respect to the same period of the previous year and fell 0.1 points in relation to the previous moving quarter, although far from the historical maximum of 13.1% reached last July.
Unemployment in Brazil, meanwhile, registered an average annual rate of 13.5% in 2020, while in the moving quarter that ended in December, the figure was 13.9%, equivalent to 13.9 million people jobless.
According to the state-run Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic were responsible for the 13.4 million average unemployed in the year.
In the 4th quarter. 2020, the unemployment rate fell to 13.9%. Despite the decrease of 0.7 percentage points compared to the 3rd quarter, when it registered 14.6% (the highest level in the historical series), the country still had 13.9 million unemployed.
Read more at: https://t.co/qqodrWj1M2 pic.twitter.com/k3cJI8pjMG– IBGE Comunica (@ibgecomunica) February 26, 2021
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In Mexico, the unemployment rate stood at 4.7% of the economically active population (EAP) in January 2021, a figure higher than 3.8% in the same month in 2020, reported the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi).
“In absolute terms, the unemployed population was 2.6 million people, 421,000 more than in January 2020,” Inegi said in a bulletin.
With EFE and local media
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