MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Magallanes Region has lowest unemployment in Chile, 4.2%

Magallanes was Chile's region with the lowest unemployment in the May-July quarter, 4.2%, compared to the national average of 8.8% according to the latest release from the Chilean Statistics Institute.

This represents a drop of 2.5 points from the same period a year ago and 0.1 less than the previous quarter in 2006. The 4.2% figure is made up of 3.8% hard unemployment and 0.4% of first time job seekers. In gender terms, women unemployment was 4.7% and men's 3.9%.

Lorena Araya, Ministry of Finance representative in Magallanes Region said that the encouraging signal of the latest percentage is that "we're analyzing a non seasonal period; this means that the government's short and long term employment policies are being successful. We haven't had such low unemployment since 1998".

At national level unemployment in Chile averaged 8.8%, which is 1.2 points less that the same period a year ago and a 0.1 improvement compared to the previous April-June quarter.

According to the Chilean Statistics Institute, the 8.8% is made up of an overall workforce contraction of 0.5% and employment increase of 0.8%. In practical terms this means that the work force has 35.300 people less and 51.850 new jobs were created. Chile's workforce totals 6.759.440 of which 6.164.680 has jobs and 594.760 are unemployed.

During the May-July quarter the number of Chileans actually unemployed was 502.470 and those first time job seekers 92.290.