Ecuador: Unemployment improved falling 1.3 points in one year

Unemployment fell 1.3 percentage points in one year in Ecuador, going from 5.2% in July 2021 to 3.9% in July this year.

It means that 94,457 people left unemployment in the last 12 months; however, the rate of other non-full employment has grown the most in this period, from 26.6% to 29.4%.

“The unemployment rate at the national level reached 3.9% compared to 5.2% in the same period of the previous year; that is, it experienced a significant reduction of 1.3 percentage points. When disaggregated by area, the unemployment rate was 4.9% for the urban area, while for the rural area it was 1.9%,” explains the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INEC) in a report published today.

Regarding the other non-full employment, this includes people with jobs that earn less than the minimum wage or worked less than the legal working day but do not have the desire and availability to work additional hours.

Likewise, full or adequate employment registers a slight increase in the last year, going from 31.8% to 32.1%; however, in the monthly register, a deterioration is evident, as it fell from 34% in June to 32.1% in July, that is, 153,760 Ecuadorians stopped having a job with all the benefits of the law in one month.

The disparity is also according to geography; for the urban area, full employment was 41.1%, and in the rural area, it reached 14.5%. In addition, men had a higher proportion of adequate employment than women. The adequate employment rate for men was 36.9%, while for women, it was 25.6%.

The branch of activity with the highest number of fully employed workers is services, followed by commerce, manufacturing, and agriculture. Likewise, 55.5% of fully employed workers are in the private sector, 24.1% are self-employed, and 20.4% are in the public sector.

With information from Bloomberg