Brazil’s Unemployment Rate Falls Again in October

By Lise Alves, Senior Contributing Reporter

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL – Brazil registered an unemployment rate of 4.7 percent last month, the lowest rate for the month of October since the start of the series, in March of 2002, according to the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics).

October’s results were 0.2 percent lower than that registered in September, when the unemployment rate was of 4.9 percent and 0.5 percent smaller than in October of 2013, when the rate was of 5.2 percent.

The IBGE report surveys the six main metropolitan regions of Brazil: Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Recife, Salvador and Porto Alegre. The number of unemployed persons in these areas total approximately 1.1 million. Unemployed persons are categorized at the IBGE as people who are actively looking for work but unable to find a job.

The number of employed persons in the private sector in these six regions remained steady at 11.7 percent, according to the institute. According to analysts one of the reasons for the decline in the unemployment rate in October from a year before (October 2013) was that the number of non-economically active persons, those outside the job market, increased by 3.3 percent, and helped reduce the number of persons categorized as unemployed.

The survey also showed that the average monthly wages for those workers in the six metropolitan areas increased in October to R$2,122.10, up by 2.3 percent from September 2014 and increase of four percent from October of 2014.