LatinNews Daily - 07 August 2020

* Brazil’s national statistics institute (Ibge) has released the latest employment figures, which show that the unemployment rate rose to 13.3% in the second quarter of the year, up 1.1 percentage points on the previous quarter (January-March), and 1.3 percentage points above the unemployment rate recorded in the second quarter of 2019. A record 8.9m people stopped working in April-June, bringing the employed population to 83.3m, the lowest figure since current records began in 2012. However, the number of unemployed people remained stable at 12.8m, as the ranks of the working-age population outside of the workforce (that is to say, not looking for work) swelled by 10.5m compared with the previous quarter, to a record 77.8m. “There is an increase in the potential workforce with people who, although they are not looking for work, would like to, and when we look closely at the reasons for which they’re not looking for work, a large contingent cites reasons linked to the pandemic”, Adriana Belinguy, an Ibge researcher, explains. 

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