Good morning! Today: Brazil’s lack of good-paying jobs. Jair Bolsonaro’s approval rating stable.
Brazil’s lack of good-paying jobs
Over 43,000 formal jobs
disappeared in March—more than half of them in the Northeast. Since January, however, the balance is positive, with net creation of 180,000 jobs. After 4 years of registering more layoffs than hires, Brazil bucked the negative trend in 2018. However, the country is failing to create good-paying jobs.
Of every 200 workers hired in 2018, only one was set to earn more than BRL 10,000 (USD 2,500) per month. And 171 of them were positions paying up to BRL 2,000. This means that the number of high-paying jobs created in 2018 was half of what the country saw in 2011. Store vendors were the category with the most hires (by far) in 2018, taking on a total of 1.8m people. Meanwhile, only 2 criminal investigation professionals (a well-paid position) were hired in all of last year.
It has never been so hard for Brazilians to recover revenue after a recession. The country’s GDP per capita has stagnated at BRL 32,000—about 9% below pre-recession levels (Q1 2014). If revenue was equally shared, each Brazilian would have BRL...