Key Points
Bolivia can claim something no other country in the region can: virtually everyone who wants a job has one. The problem is what that job looks like. The latest employment survey from Bolivia’s National Statistics Institute paints a labor market that is simultaneously full and fragile — a paradox that captures the broader contradictions of Latin America’s poorest economy.
The Numbers
Urban unemployment fell to 2.3% at the close of 2025, down from 3.3% a year earlier. The economically active population reached 5.17 million people and the employed population hit 5.48 million. The participation rate rose to 77.1% and the occupation rate to 75.4%, indicating that cities are absorbing more workers. Santa Cruz, the country’s commercial capital in the east, recorded 1.8% unemployment. La Paz registered 2.1%. Even Cochabamba, traditionally the weakest of the three main cities, fell to 3.4%.
The result places Bolivia comfortably below Colombia, Chile, Peru and Brazil, a position confirmed by CEPAL’s latest statistical yearbook.
The Quality Gap
Nearly all of that employment is informal. According to the statistics institute, 86.5% of men and 82.7% of women worked without contracts, social security or labor protections in 2025. CEPAL estimates the national informality rate at roughly 80%. The U.S. State Department’s 2025 investment climate report confirms the figure, noting that Bolivia has no unemployment insurance or employment safety net. Workers are employed, but they are largely unprotected.
The sectoral breakdown reinforces the picture. Nearly 59% of all employment is concentrated in four activities: commerce at 23.7%, manufacturing at 15.4%, food and hospitality at 10.8%, and transport and storage at 8.8%. These are precisely the sectors where informality thrives. Gender gaps persist as well. Male unemployment was 1.8% versus 2.8% for women. The participation gap was wider: 82.2% for men against 72.3% for women, a difference of nearly ten percentage points. Youth unemployment, at 3.7% for those aged 16 to 28, remains the highest of any group.
An Economy in Emergency
The employment data arrives against severe economic distress. Bolivia’s new government, which took office in November 2025 after elections ended nearly two decades of socialist rule, declared an economic emergency in December. It scrapped fuel subsidies and began loosening the fixed exchange rate that had pegged the boliviano to the dollar for years. Foreign reserves had collapsed to under $2 billion ($1.9 billion) by late 2024, with only $47 million in liquid currency. Inflation surged past 25% by mid-2025, and the parallel dollar traded at roughly double the official rate.
In this context, the 2.3% unemployment rate is less a sign of economic health than a reflection of how informality functions as a shock absorber. When formal jobs disappear and the economy contracts, people do not stop working — they move into street vending, transport and domestic services without any institutional safety net. Bolivia has the region’s lowest unemployment because it has virtually no barrier between employment and survival.