Clarín: “Argentina’s unemployment rate is one of the highest in the region” True.

13/2/2015

Clarín recently reported that “according to INDEC, unemployment is 7.5 percent, the third-highest percentage in South America.” Despite the recent decline, Argentina does have an unemployment rate that is higher than those of most countries in the continent.

The data corresponds to INDEC’s numbers for the third quarter of last year, representing the percentage of the working-age population which tried to get a job during that time, but failed.

Colombia, Venezuela and Surinam are the only countries in South America that have a higher unemployment rate, according to International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) estimates.

The IMF numbers line up with Clarin’s data that come from the Empiria consultancy, directed by the former chief economist of the Central Bank — between 2007 and 2010 — Pedro Rabasa.

“Unemployment in Argentina was never an issue until the 1990s, when it reached a double-digit number, and remained that way until early 2000. After the crisis, everything began to fall apart,” explained Luis Beccaria, Ph. D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge.

Beccaria, who is also a Specialist in Labour Markets from the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento (UNGS), believes that “Argentina’s employment issues are not only evident in unemployment rates, but also, and principally, in the informality. This does not mean that the unemployment rate does not reflect the economy’s ups and downs, but that both rates must be read as a whole.”

According to calculations from the International Labour Organization (ILO), in Argentina there is a 46.8-percent rate of under-the-table employment — the same percentage as the average for Latin America.

ILO considers a number of subgroups in order to classify someone as informally employed. The Labour Ministry regularly publishes the proportion of informal employees, but it takes into account only those who do not have pension contributions, which in Argentina was 33.6 percent in the third quarter of 2014.

In several countries, especially in Central America, low unemployment is compensated by a high rate of informality, although that is not always the case.

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