In Ecuador, 700 thousand suitable jobs were lost in the pandemic.
Roberto Castillo, director of the INEC, detailed the results of the employment and underemployment survey with a cutoff date of December 2021, which shows that 180,000 people have emerged from unemployment since May of the previous year and 350,000 have adequate employment.
He explained that at the end of 2021 adequate employment reached 33.9%, which means that 67% of economically active people do not have a job or earn less than the unified basic salary.
He mentioned that in pre-pandemic times adequate employment reached 38.8%, then, with the health crisis, it fell to 30% and in the last year it recovered by four percentage points:
“That is 350 thousand people, now we need to grow and return to pre-pandemic levels.”
He recognized that underemployment is effectively a response to the contraction of the labor market and the collapse of companies that led to 700,000 people becoming unemployed:
“We have recovered 350 thousand because when jobs are lost, people take refuge in informal jobs even though they do not contribute to social security.”
“International organizations consider that broadly speaking it will take between two to three years to return to pre-pandemic levels, each country has different political and economic situations.”
Despite this, he insisted that in Ecuador, the last seven months have been of notable and important growth: “But new incentives will be required.”
He asserted that the income salary gap between men and women is between 12% and 15%, however the latter group has recovered adequate employment faster since the main positions that were opened correspond to the service area.
“At the national level, December 2021, the figure closed at 350,000 people unemployed, of which 175,000 are men and 180,000 are women.”
He stressed that the recovery of employment also had an impact on poverty, which went from 36% to 27.7%: “This reduction of 8% implies more than 750,000 people who have come out of monetary poverty.”
He reported that during the pandemic, 1.4 million people fell into poverty with incomes that did not allow them to meet their basic food needs: “In the first months, about 750,000 have managed to get out, this is positive, but care must be taken because the income of those households they are affected or are sensitive to what is happening in the labor market”.
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