Economy & Business - May 2020

REGION | IDB warns of unemployment. A working paper published last month by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which estimates redundancies in the formal sector per country and job type in Latin America, has warned that the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic will have a severe impact on employment and social security in Central America. According to the IDB study, El Salvador will be the country worst affected in Central America, warning that it could lose between 8.6% and 23.9% of formal sector workers depending on different timescale scenarios; Panama could loose between 8.4% and 23.7% formal sector workers. Meanwhile the estimates for Costa Rica (7.9%-22.4%), Guatemala (7.5%-21.1%), Honduras (7.9%-21.7%) and Nicaragua (7.5%-20.9%) are similar and far exceed the projections for elsewhere in Latin America such as Argentina (1.2%-4.8%), Brazil (4.2%-14.8%) and Peru (3.3%-11.8%).