Brazilians skeptical about economy, 4.8m became discouraged workers in Q2
Staff Writer |
Brazilian voters don't expect the economy to improve any time soon, according to a Datafolha pool carried out between August 20th and 21st.
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Unemployment, one of the indicators with worse numbers in the country, will deteriorate even further, 48% of interviewees say. For 19% of them, it will improve, Folha de S.Paulo reported.
The responses reveal the same pessimism disclosed in the previous poll, from early June: 46% predicted further decline in employment and 22% expected an improvement.
Variations are within the margin of error, of two percentage points above or below the results.
The poll interviewed 8,433 people face to face in 313 municipalities. The results' confidence interval is 95%.
Unemployment in Brazil shot up after 2015, according to data from IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, a government agency with the same role as the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the U.S.)
The unemployment rate, which was 6.5% in late 2014, peaked at 13.7% in the first quarter of 2017. The rate for the second quarter of 2018, the most recent one, is 12.4%.
Expectations for inflation are also negative. For 54% of interviewees, it will rise. This goes in line with the last poll from June, that showed 52% predicted a turn for the worse.
Regarding the general economy, for 41% think it will continue as it is. 31% say it will get worse, while 23% expect it to get better.
The number of Brazilians who are no longer seeking employment shot to an all-time high in the second quarter of the year. Between April and June, there were 4.83 million discouraged workers in the country.
The hidden unemployment rate reached 4.4% and it is the highest in the current survey historical data series, which started in 2012.
The discouraged group has 838,000 more individuals than the same period in 2017.
The increase in this group of unemployed people who would like to work, but are not currently looking for jobs, is one of the reasons why the unemployment rate decreased from 13.1% in the first quarter to 12.4% in the second quarter.
The age group above 40 years old is gaining ground among the active seekers. The range between 40 and 59 years old represented in this period 22.7% of unemployed people.
This amounts to 2.95 million individuals, a 131% increase from the second quarter of 2014, before the recession that deeply impacted the labor market.
In this period, 1.67 million workers in this age bracket were laid off. ■