QCOSTARICA – The number of unemployed in Costa Rica between November and December 2022 and January 2023 is 287,000 people, a figure that is equivalent to 11.8%. If compared to the same period of the previous year (November-December 2021, January 2022), the figure experienced a drop of 1.3 percentage points.
However, it is important to take into account that when this comparison is made with the last months of 2022, the trend in the measurement of the unemployment rate has fluctuated around 12%, which shows that this indicator stagnates.
According to Braulio Villegas, coordinator of the survey, when analyzing what happened during 2022, there is a tendency for unemployment to decrease from the beginning of the year and it continued like this until the middle of the period and then it began to oscillate in values between 11.5 % and 12%.
“It is also necessary to remember that these are estimates that are made through a sample and small variations can be due to a sampling error, since it is an estimate,” emphasized Villegas.
Another issue that seems to be a trend is that women continue to be the most affected by unemployment, and in the moving quarter (November-December and January), a total of 148,000 unemployed people are women and 139,000 men.
At a press conference, president Rodrigo Chaves was asked about the unemployment results and the actions that the government is promoting to reduce these figures, to which the president replied that they are working on developing the employment route and that it will be presented next July.
“We are doing what can be done because the Government cannot hire these people, there are different causes, for example, that people do not have the elements that companies demand to give them employment, the public sector does not have the money to hire people to reduce employment and we do not believe that it should be done, so we must work on tools to support economic reactivation, in addition to addressing the education problems we have,” Chaves said.
Underemployment down
Villegas pointed out that a striking fact is that underemployment remains low, standing today at 8.5%, and being one of the indicators that increased the most with the pandemic – up to 26%, Due to the reduction in working hours, today it is even below pre-pandemic levels when it had levels above 12.8%.
When the data is analyzed by gender, the male underemployment rate was estimated at 7.3% for the period of November and December 2022 and January 2023, while the female rate was 10.4%, reinforcing the trend that the most affected in terms of employment are women.
According to the survey, national underemployment decreased in that period, compared to the same time of the previous year, by 4.2 percentage points, and if it is observed disaggregated, the reduction was 3% in men and 6.1% in women, figures that are statistically significant.
