The Brazilian labor market added almost 221,000 net formal jobs in August, the Labor Ministry reported on Monday.
The numbers outpaced expectations from economists (which hovered between 180,000 and 200,000), corroborating last week’s strong unemployment report — the joblessness rate is down to 7.8 percent, the lowest since February 2015.
In the 12 months up to August, the economy created 1.5 million new formal jobs — which now total 43.8 million. From August 2020, when Brazil was facing the worst of the pandemic downturn, the gain of new formal jobs topped the 7 million mark.
August saw the continuation of months-long labor trends, with the services sector adding more jobs than any other in the month. Since January, though, the construction sector saw the biggest boom in job creation — with its workforce going up by 9.2 percent in the eight-month span.
Almost two-thirds of the new jobs added into the Brazilian economy this year have been filled by workers aged 18 to 24 — a demographic that struggled to get into the job market in recent years, especially after the Covid crisis.
Overall economic growth has remained vigorous in recent months, forcing markets to revise their forecasts upwards. The median GDP growth projection by investors polled by the Central Bank weekly sits at 2.92 percent — the same as last week but well above a month ago (2.56 percent).
And while entry-level wages have remained somewhat stable over the past year, The Brazilian Report has shown that Brazilians have gained purchasing power in recent months. We compared the 12-month growth of “average habitual real income,” which tends to smooth out seasonal fluctuations, with Brazil’s official IPCA consumer price index.
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