Lower unemployment is because people accepted lower wages, says researcher

The unemployment rate in Brazil stood at 9.8% in the quarter ended in May, the lowest rate for the period since 2015, when it was 8.3%, informed the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) this Thursday ( 30). Fernando de Holanda, researcher at FGV Ibre, in an interview with CNN , stated that the reduction in the number is because people accepted lower wages. “This was already expected and was even a natural effect of the pandemic”.

Since 2015, the return of workers in an informal way has been a practice in the economy since 2015. “And whoever came back stronger [agora] were workers with low professional qualifications”.

The informality rate, according to IBGE data, was 40.1% of the employed population (or 39.1 million informal workers), against 40.2% in the previous quarter and 39.5% in the same quarter of 2021 .

Another point that helped the resumption of this way of working, according to de Holanda, is the differential in the costs of hiring a worker informally and formally.

Future

For the researcher, the main concern is that the economy can maintain a high rate of growth for longer, “because, otherwise, it will be increasingly difficult to resume workers who have been unemployed for more than two years.”

Holland’s expectation is that unemployment will rise again a little in the second half of the year due to the fight against inflation. “In the medium term, I do not expect the economy to be able to maintain the rapid pace of reduction in the unemployment rate”.