This Thursday, the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos (INEC) – National Institute of Statistics and Census – announced that unemployment in Costa Rica increased and now 296,000 people have no job.
According to INEC, the unemployment rate is now 11.3%.
“For the second quarter of 2019, 296,000 people are unemployed, 90,000 more people actively sought a job and did not find it compared to the second quarter of 2018. Of the total unemployed, 147,000 were men and 149,000 women,” INEC explained.
The year-on-year increase in the unemployed is a product of the increase in the labor supply, both in men and women. That is, more people are looking for a job but cannot find one.
Informality
For the second quarter of 2019, the percentage of employed persons with informal employment – workers that do not have formal employment arrangements, benefits or social protection, for example, casual or day laborers, domestic workers – was 46.3%.
Thus, the population without a fixed job was close to 1 million, of which 593,000 were men and 419,000 women.
