Unemployment down to 7.8% in quarter ending in August

Brazil’s unemployment rate stood at 7.8 percent in the quarter ending in August this year. The percentage is at its lowest since February 2015 (7.5%) and shows the proportion of people who looked for a job and could not find one in the period relative to the labor force, which is the sum of the employed and unemployed.

The rate decreased both from the previous quarter—ending in May this year (8.3%)—and from the quarter ending in August 2022 (8.9%). The data were released Friday (Sep. 29) by statistics bureau IBGE.

The unemployed population reached 8.4 million, down 5.9 percent (528 thousand fewer people) against the previous quarter and 13.2 percent (1.3 million fewer) against the previous year. This is the lowest figure since June 2015 (8.5 million).

The employed population (99.7 million), in turn, grew by 1.3 percent in the quarter (1.3 million more people) and 0.6 percent (641,000 more people) over the year. The level of employment, i.e. the percentage of employed people in the working-age population, stood at 57 percent, up from the previous quarter (56.4%) and stable compared to last year.

The informality rate hit 39.1 percent of the employed population (or 38.9 million workers without a documented job), up from 38.9 percent in the previous quarter, but down from 39.7 percent observed in the same quarter of 2022.