The Brazilian unemployment rate increased to 8.6 percent in the rolling quarter ending in February. Some 9.2 million working-age Brazilians are without a job, up 200,000 from the previous rolling quarter but down 2.6 percent from a year ago.
In January, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics read a 0.5 percentage point increase as stability. Now, the institute sees the result as a possible return to “usual seasonality.”
“Unemployment growth in this period may signal a return to the seasonality characteristic of the labor market. If we look retrospectively, in the historical series of the survey, all the moving quarters ending in February are marked by the expansion of unemployment, except 2022,” evaluated Adriana Beringuy, the institute’s work and income research coordinator, in a statement.
Some analysts, however, warned that it was the second consecutive rate increase after ten straight drops, possibly a slight deterioration of the labor market compared to the 7.9 percent rate verified in the three months through December.
For 2023 as a whole, independent brokerage XP projects a stagnation of the Brazilian labor market, with a slight advance in hiring and the maintenance of a lower unemployment rate than in 2022 during the first half of the year, but a moderate decline in formal job creation and a possible increase in the unemployment rate in the second half of the year.
Projections, in general, indicate that the country’s job market in 2023 will be affected by the economic slowdown detected by other variables in the last quarter of last year, mainly caused by the high interest rate, which makes debt and credit more expensive.
From December 2002 to February 2023, employed adults 14 years old or more reached a total of 98.1 million people, 5.5 percent more than in the previous quarter, but 23.2 percent below a year ago.
The average monthly income, currently at BRL 2,853 (USD 556), also remained practically stable compared to the previous quarter, but 7.5 percent higher than in the quarter ending February 2022. Analysts expect this figure to rise throughout 2023, albeit at a slow pace.
There was no growth in employment in any of the sectors analyzed by the survey; four of them, in fact, registered declines: public administration, defense, social security, education, human health, and social services (-2.7%), industry (-2.7%), agriculture, livestock, forest production, fisheries, and aquaculture (-2.3%) and other services (-3.2%).
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