Unemployment Rises to 12.7 Percent in March and Strikes 13.4 Million Brazilians

By Richard Mann, Contributing Reporter

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazil’s unemployment rate increased to 12.7 percent in the first quarter, reaching 13.4 million people, according to data released by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) on Tuesday.

This is the highest unemployment rate since the quarter that ended in June 2018, when the rate also stood at 12.7 percent.

In the quarter ended in March, the unemployment rate established by IBGE was 12.4 percent, striking 13.1 million Brazilians.

According to the IBGE, the rate of under-utilization of manpower reached 25 percent in the quarter that ended in March, the highest ever recorded since 2012, up 1.2 percent in relation to the previous quarter (23.8%).

The underutilized population also reached a record number of 28.3 million, up 5.6 percent (1.5 million people) from the previous quarter and 3 percent (819 thousand people more) in the yearly comparison.

Meanwhile, the number of employed people in Brazil in the first three months of 2019 was 91.9 million, down by 0.9 percent from the quarter ending in December 2018. However, the employment figure was 1.8 percent higher than that registered during the same period in 2018.

​Brazil ended 2018 with an average unemployment rate of 12.3 percent or 12.8 million jobless people. The growth of unemployment stopped in that year, after having continually increased since 2015 as a result of the economic crisis the country had suffered.