Brazil & Southern Cone - February 2026

ARGENTINA | Slashing of public sector jobs continues. The national statistics institute (Indec) released new figures on 30 January which showed a 7.2% decrease in public sector jobs in 2025, amounting to 21,742 jobs being cut. According to Indec’s figures, some 280,120 people were employed in the public sector in December 2025, compared to 301,862 in December 2024. The most affected sectors were presidential and ministerial staff, where jobs were reduced by 10.5%, and public companies, which lost 7.4% of their workforce. The decrease marks the continuation of President Javier Milei’s ‘chainsaw’ approach, which has seen him slash public sector jobs since he took office in December 2023. Milei’s minister for deregulation and state transformation, Federico Sturzenegger, praised the decrease in public sector jobs on social media, saying this “chainsaw” is what had allowed Milei and Economy Minister Luis Caputo “to lower national taxes”. On the other side, Rodolfo Aguiar, secretary general of the association of state workers (ATE), lamented the cuts, telling Spanish news agency EFE they had caused a “phenomenal loss of rights for all the people”.

BRAZIL | Record oil and gas production in 2025. The federal oil and gas regulator (ANP) reported on 2 February that national oil and natural gas production totalled 4.9m barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd) in 2025, up 13.3% compared to 2024. The ANP highlighted this annual result as a record figure, surpassing the previous annual record of 4.34m boepd registered in 2023. Annual oil production in 2025 stood at 3.77m barrels per day (bpd), up 12.3% on the previous year, while natural gas production averaged 179m cubic metres per day (m³/d), up 17% compared to 2024. The ANP also released the monthly production figures for December 2025, showing oil and gas output averaging 5.24m boepd. Monthly oil production was 4.02m bpd, up 6.4% on the previous month and up 17.4% on the same month in 2024. Natural gas production in December 2025 stood at 194.33m m³/d, up 6.4% in monthly terms and 20.6% year-on-year.

Brazil & Southern Cone: inflation rate
Percentage variation (year-on-year)

Brazil & Southern Cone: GDP growth (%)
Quarterly figures are year-on-year growth