LatinNews Daily - 30 May 2023

*Mexico’s national statistics institute (Inegi) has published new figures which show that the unemployment rate stood at 2.7% of the economically active population – people over the age of 15 who are employed or seeking employment – in the first quarter of 2023, equating to 1.6m people. This is a 0.8 percentage point decrease on the unemployment rate registered in Q1 2022. On seasonally-adjusted figures, unemployment was down by 0.3 percentage points as compared to the previous quarter. According to Inegi, the number of people in Mexico’s economically active population who were employed in Q1 2023 equalled 58.5m, up 2.4m on the same quarter of 2022. Inegi noted that the number of people employed in the informal sector totalled 32.2m, equivalent to 55.1% of the employed population – an increase of 1.2m people compared with the same period in 2022. It found that the greatest rates of labour informality were found in the southern states of Oaxaca (80%), Guerrero (79.3%) and Chiapas (73.9%), whereas the northern states of Chihuahua (34.1 %), Coahuila (34.6 %), Nuevo León (36.7 %), Baja California and Baja California Sur (37.8 %) registered the lowest levels of labour informality.