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The unemployment rate in the third quarter of 2021 is lower than a year ago, although it is not yet at pre-pandemic levels. The factors that most inhibit economic recovery are precariousness and informality.
Mexico is one of the few countries in Latin America that, during the pandemic, had the luxury of continuing to enjoy a single-digit unemployment rate.
Even in the worst moment of the crisis, its unemployment level reached 6%, a figure that could well be envied by other large economies in the region, such as Brazil or Colombia, which have not managed to return to single digits after the pandemic coup. and today they exceed 12%.
But the real challenge in the second largest Latin American economy -after Brazil- lies in the informality and precariousness of an employed population of around 60 million people.
Less unemployment, more informality
The National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi) revealed that the unemployment rate closed the third quarter of 2021 at 4.2%, one percentage point less than in the same period of 2020, but still higher than the pre-pandemic figure.
This implies that 2.5 million people were unemployed at the end of September, when at the worst moment of the crisis more than 12 million people left the workforce due to the pandemic.
However, it is hasty to speak of recovery. “We are approaching this natural tendency that we have had for many years in the labor market, a precarious, bad market that is not enrolling its workers in social security,” Professor Edmar Ariel Lezama told the EFE agency , coordinator of the Unique Program of Specializations in Economics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
Indeed, Inegi accounted for around 31.4 million informal workers in the third quarter of 2021, a rate of 56.3%, and an increase of 3.9 million people compared to the same months of 2020 and 200,000 people compared to 2019.
“The precariousness of the labor market has become an important factor that inhibits a rapid recovery of the domestic market,” observed the Center for Economic Studies of the Private Sector (CEESP) in an analysis of the labor market report presented by Inegi.
With EFE and local media
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