Rio de Janeiro (awp/afp) – The unemployment rate in Brazil continued to decline, to 6.6% during the June-August quarter, the lowest for this period of the year since 2012, according to official data published Friday.
According to the Brazilian Institute of Statistics (IBGE), this is the fifth consecutive drop in this rate, which stood at 6.8% over the period from May to July.
Latin America’s largest economy has 7.3 million people looking for work, estimates the IBGE, the lowest figure since 2015, in a country of 212 million inhabitants.
And the unemployment rate fell by 1.2 percentage points in one year.
The active population also reached a new historic record at 102.5 million people between June and August, according to the IBGE.
But Brazil has 39.8 million workers in the informal sector, or 38.8% of this active population.
The average monthly income during the June-August period amounted to 3,228 reais (around 530 euros at the current exchange rate), an increase of 5.1% compared to the same period last year, higher than inflation which reached a rate of 4.24% over 12 months in August.
These figures represent good news for the government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who made reducing unemployment one of his main campaign promises before returning to power for a third term in January 2023.
However, some economists fear that this drop in unemployment will encourage inflation by increasing consumer demand.
The Central Bank last week raised its key rate, the main tool for controlling inflation, for the first time in two years, to 10.75%.
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