Informality exceeds 70% in six cities

Of the 17 million 319,900 Peruvians who had a job between April 2022 and March of this year, 73.5% of people had an informal job; that is, without labor rights or social protection. While the remaining 26.5% declared having found a formal position, according to the latest INEI report on the behavior of the labor market at the national level.

decentralized look

According to the report of the statistical entity, the informal employment rate exceeds 70% in six cities in Peru.

pucallpa is the most affected, since of the 190,000 people who work in this city, 76.1% do so under precarious conditions. It is followed by Ayacucho, where 74.8% of the 113,300 jobs are informal. In addition, regarding the latter, it is worth mentioning that in the department that bears the same name it is one of the jurisdictions that presented a level of poverty above 40% in 2022.

Other cities with high informality are Iquitos (73.5%), Tacna (72.2%), Puerto Maldonado (71.4%) and moyobamba (70.1%).

Likewise, only five of the 26 cities analyzed have a labor informality rate of less than 60%. These are chachapoyas (59.9%), metropolitan Lima and Callao (59.3%), Arequipa (59%), Moquegua (58.5%) and Ica (58.3%).

Unemployment

On the other hand, the INEI study reveals that Puno doubled its unemployment rate in one year, going from 7.6% to 15.3% at the end of the first quarter of 2023.

Huancavelica with 15.2%, Cusco with 12.3%, Huancayo with 10.5%, Cajamarca with 10.1% and Huánuco with 10% are the other cities with the highest unemployment rate in the country.

By contrast, abancay (6%), Moyobamba (6%), Huaraz (5.2%), Ica (5.2%), Pucallpa (4.7%) and Tarapoto (4.7%) registered the lowest unemployment rate. This despite the fact that in these last two cities the indicator rose from one year to the next.

The data

At the national level. 95.1% of the employed population in rural areas have informal employment, while in the urban area it is 68%, according to the INEI.