ILO expects employment in Latin America to grow by barely 0.9%

Employment in Latin America will grow just 0.9% in 2023 (2.9 million new jobs) and 1.4% in 2024 (4.6 million), indicated today the global labor market outlook report of the International Labor Organization ( ILO).

This will mean a sharp slowdown after regional employment growth of 6.4% in 2021 and 4.9% in 2022, underlines the ILO, which also calculates a stabilization of the current number of unemployed in Latin America (22 million) for both this year as for the next.

The unemployment rate in Latin American countries will remain equally stable at 7% these two years, even below the percentage before the pandemic (8% in 2019), and after that in 2020, the year in which the crisis health impacted more on employment, rising to 10.2%.

The report considers that Latin America, like other regions, will be harmed by political uncertainties and inflation, which in 2022 already translated into slowdowns in countries such as Mexico or Brazil, and which in 2023 will continue to reduce external demand for raw materials and other regional products.

ILO figures predict that it will go from 315 million employed people in 2022 (58% of the active population) to 317.9 million in 2023 and 322.5 million in 2024, with still very unequal rates according to gender.

In 2022, while the percentage of employment in the male active population was 70% (183 million workers), in the female it only rose to 46.5% (132 million).

The ILO calculates that in the region there are some 57.1 million people who are either unemployed or want to work but cannot (16.3% of the active population).

It also highlights that the informality rate, one of the major structural problems of employment in Latin America, stands at 53.7%, having increased as a result of the pandemic.

Source: EFE