RIO DE JANEIRO: Brazil's jobless rate fell below 12 percent in the final quarter of 2017, returning to levels last seen more than a year ago, the government statistics office said Wednesday.
The fourth quarterly rate was 11.8 percent, the IBGE said, compared to 12 percent in the last quarter of 2016.
The latest dip confirmed Brazil's slow exit from its worst recession in history, which saw a peak in unemployment of 13.7 percent in March 2017.
Despite the good news, which dovetails with a modest increase in economic growth and downward inflation, there are still 12.3 million people listed as unemployed, the IBGE statistics office said. That is 650,000 fewer people than in the third quarter of last year.
The IBGE said that new job growth was driven largely by the informal sector and self-employed, with fewer new jobs featuring formal, full-blown contracts.
The jobless rate is now the same as in the August-October 2016 period.
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