MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

No significant changes in Chile's unemployment rate

Chile's labor market contraction is expected to continue

Unemployment in Chile stood at 8.0 % in the August-October 2022 mobile quarter, according to a report from the National Statistics Institute (INE) released Tuesday, which represented no substantial changes from the previous three months.

The new figures only showed a 0.1% yoy improvement, the document highlighted. The INE's National Employment Survey showed a slight year-on-year decrease as employment grew by 4.9 % while the labor force only increased by 4.8 %. Work opportunities stemmed mainly from the mining sector (26.1 %), households as employers (19.5 %), and transport (13.3 %).

“In twelve months, the estimate of the total number of employed persons grew 4.9%, mainly affected by the transportation, mining, and household sectors as employers,” the report stated.

The number of unemployed people increased by 3.4 % from the previous year, while the population outside the labor market decreased by 4.2 %, it was also reported.

The INE study also found that the informal employment rate was 27.7 %, with a year-on-year decrease of 0.2 percentage points, while the number of people employed in the informal sector grew by 3.9 %.

In the Santiago Metropolitan Region, unemployment for the quarter fell 0.4 percentage points.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment reached its highest levels in a decade in Chile. “We expect the labor market contraction to continue as the economic slowdown deepens. The economy is still in an adjustment phase after the 2021 overexpansion,” Economist Arturo Claro said in a report published by Reuters.

“There are still more than 500,000 jobs to recover to reach pre-pandemic employment rates,” he added.