Over 11 million jobless in Brazil

All across the country, the unemployment rate closed out the quarter ending in July at 11.6%, up 0.4 percentage points from the 11.2% observed in the previous quarter (February to April).

The data can be found in the National Household Sample Survey (known as Continuous PNAD), released today (Aug. 3) by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). This is the highest unemployment rate in the time series started in 2012.

Compared with the same quarter last year, when the estimated rate stood at 8.6%, joblessness shows an accumulated increase of three percentage points. The IBGE data further reveal that the unemployed population (11.8 million) rose 3.8% compared with the February-April quarter (11.4 million), an expansion of 436 thousand people.

In the quarter ending in July, the jobless population in Brazil rose 37.4% against the same quarter last year, an increase of 3.2 million unemployed people.

Employed population

The data indicate that the employed population in the quarter ending in July totaled 90.5 million people—holding steady when compared to the quarter preceding it (February-April this year), as the 146 thousand job posts closed between from one period to the other “did not amount to a statistically significant number.”

In the comparison with the same quarter in 2015, when the unemployed totaled 92.2 million, a decline of 1.8% (some 1.7 million) was reported in the number of workers.

Translated by Fabrício Ferreira