Brazil's unemployment rate for May through August will not be public until days before a hotly contested presidential election, after a strike disrupted the collection of jobless data, government's statistics agency IBGE said on Thursday. The IBGE, which had been to release July's jobless data on Thursday, said it will now take until September 25 to process the numbers because part of its staff had been out of the office for nearly three months.
Signs of a recession have piled up in recent weeks, with job cuts in key sectors such as retail suggesting unemployment could rise from record lows - in a potential blow to President Dilma Rousseff's hope to be re-elected in the October 5 general elections. That is not certain, though, as weaker job creation has been accompanied by slower growth in Brazil's workforce over the past few years. Teenagers and young adults have increasingly passed up jobs to dedicate more time to education and training, which could help keep the unemployment rate around the 4.9 percent recorded in April.
While Rousseff is in the lead, recent polls show she is unlikely to clinch most votes in the October 5 election, forcing her into a runoff against the runner-up. IBGE did release the jobless rate for a few major cities, showing a slight drop in the unemployment rate Sao Paulo, to 4.9 percent from 5.1 percent in June, and an increase in Rio de Janeiro, to 3.6 percent in July from 3.2 percent in June.
Comments
Comments are closed.