2 million jobs lost in LatAm: ILO

The economic state of Latin America has not fared well in the almost two weeks of 2010. From the sharp devaluation of the Venezuelan Bolivar to the central bank controversy in Argentina, the region has started the year on the financial wrong foot.

Whether Latin America’s economy rebounds soon remains to be seen yet there will be undoubtedly by a rough road ahead:

The economic crisis eliminated 2.2 million jobs last year in Latin America and the Caribbean, a figure that boosted the rate of unemployment from 7.5 percent to 8.4 percent, according to a report by the International Labor Organization released here Monday…

The U.N. body said that the unemployment rate increased in 2009 in 12 of the 14 countries studied. Only Peru and Uruguay escaped…

ILO regional director Jean Maninat said that what did increase in the region was informal employment, “which continues to be a kind of refuge from unemployment.”

“Of every 10 jobs created, six were in the informal sector,” Maninat said.

The increase in unemployment last year put a halt to six years of regional job growth. Though the ILO study did point out that unemployment was expected to decline slightly by 0.2% this year, the report found that the change would do very little to alleviate the region’s crushing poverty. “The invisible hand of the market is not strong or efficient enough to develop sustainable businesses or to create the employment levels we need," he observed while calling on governments to be more active in creating jobs.

Image- New York Times (“In Santiago, (Chile) graffiti says “unemployment is humiliation.”)
Online Sources- CNN, Bloomberg, LAHT, Reuters BusninessWeek, The Latin Americanist