[ad_1]
The director of the Center for Longitudinal Surveys and Studies of the Catholic University, the economist David Bravo, issued a warning, in view and consideration of the worrying unemployment figures that continue to be affected by the crisis that generated the pandemic.
“At any moment unemployment will jump,” David Bravo told Radio Cooperativa, pointing out that the destruction of two million jobs in Chile, as a result of the coronavirus, is equivalent, for a normal period, to an unemployment rate in the order of 28% to 30%.
Let us remember that the last figure reported by the National Statistics Institute (INE) at the end of August, for the May-July quarter, was 13.1%.
According to the economist, the figure is explained, in part, “because people are not looking for work”, that is, they lose their jobs and are not looking for another. “This is a very particular situation that we are seeing,” he commented, referring to the virus and, mainly, confinement.
Bravo calls this group of people not looking for a new job “the discouraged ones.” For this reason, he added, “unemployment will jump at any moment.”
Making a kind of prediction, the economist assures that “it is quite probable that when the activity becomes a little more regular, unemployment will go away and it will tell us: unemployment rate of 20 or 23 percent. When?” – I don’t know … In October (probably), so what do you mean? That we are going to start taking measures in October, “the expert told the radio.
Bravo also said that “one requires the indicators for something, not simply to contemplate them, but to make a diagnosis and be able to design policies. If the indicator jumps late, and if we are also going to design policies by looking at the indicator poorly, the indicator will not you have to use it. “
“I have said please do not use the unemployment rate; it is useless for this crisis, and the truth is that it can lead to wrong conclusions and recommendations, so let’s focus on the fall in employment, which is what people feel”, the academic concluded.
It is worth mentioning that this week the results of the latest survey by the Center for Longitudinal Studies of the Catholic University were released, which revealed that the proportion of employed people with respect to the working-age population was 44.3 percent in August , which translates into 312 thousand jobs created. As a counterpart, a study commissioned by the National Confederation of Commercial Workers (Conatracops), accounts for 1.5 million jobs lost and another 800 thousand suspended so far in 2020.
Asked about the aforementioned results, Bravo said however that “with this small recovery in employment, even if we compare with 12 months before, using the figures that the INE had for the month of August of last year, we are still two million jobs below … This is to measure the enormous crisis we have, “he explained.
[ad_2]
