Welcome to “Number of the Week,” where we choose a single figure that helps understand what is going on in Brazil. This week, we show who suffered the most from the drop in employment in Brazil in 2020.
- 7.9%
- fewer Brazilians are employed
Unemployment has remained in double digits since the 2014-2016 crisis, but the pandemic blew the problem out of all proportion. Household surveys carried out by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) show that employment was growing at an average rate of 1.7 percent a year between 2017 and 2019.
But after the coronavirus shut down the global economy, the percentage of Brazilians in employment shrank by nearly 8 percent. The official unemployment rate sits at 14.7 percent, a record.
But researchers from think tank Fundação Getulio Vargas have scrutinized the...
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