Brazil has unemployment of 7.8% in the three months to February and average income rises, says IBGE

The average unemployment rate in Brazil was 7.8% in the quarter ended in February, 0.3 percentage points above that recorded in the quarter ended in November and also higher than the 7.6% observed in January, according to data from the National Survey for Continuous Household Sample (PNAD Contínua) released this Thursday (28) by IBGE. The unemployment rate in Brazil was 7.8 percent in the three months up to February,

The data was in line with what was expected by the LSEG consensus among analysts, which predicted a rate of 7.8% for this period.

Compared to the same period in 2023, the unemployment rate fell 0.8 percentage points.

Despite the increase in the unemployment rate, the employed population remained stable. In a note, Adriana Beringuy, coordinator of Household Surveys at IBGE, explained that the increase in the unemployment rate is associated with a resumption of the search for employment by a portion of the population.

For her, this increase is associated “with the return of people who, eventually, had interrupted their search for work in December and returned to looking for a job in the early months of the following year”.

The unemployed population, that is, those who were looking for work, reached 8.5 million, an increase of 4.1% in the quarterly comparison. In the annual comparison, there was a 7.5% decrease in the number of unemployed people compared to the same moving quarter of 2023.

The number of employed people stood at 100.2 million, stable according to IBGE data.

Among the employed population, there are 37.9 million workers with a formal contract in the private sector, or 37.9% of the total. The second largest contingent is self-employed workers, who total 25.4 million people, 25.4% of the total. Public sector employees, including military personnel, number 12 million (12%). The rest including domestic workers and employers.

Average income grows

The average real income of workers reached R$3,110 in the moving quarter ending in February 2024, with an increase of 1.1% in the quarter and 4.3% in the year, already discounting the effects of inflation in these periods.

For the IBGE specialist, this increase is related to the accommodation and disposal sectors, which become more heated in the months between December and February.