More unemployment but less inequality last year in Brazil

The number of unemployed grew by 9.3 percent in Brazil last year to 7.3 million, which did not stop inequality in the country from maintaining its downward trend, according to a study released Friday by the government.

Brazil, a nation of historic inequality, last year also managed to reduce illiteracy, raise the inhabitants’ average years of education, improve workers’ incomes, boost the number of people with their own homes and increase the number of cybernauts to half the population.

At the same time, the number of working minors increased in 2014, the wage gap between men and women remained high and the percentage of homes with access to basic services stabilized.

Coming up with these results was the National Study of Households (PNAD), a wideranging survey taken yearly by the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics, or IBGE, whose data in the new edition constitute a detailed portrait of the country in 2014.

According to the study, despite the progress shown by several social and economic indicators in a year when the economy grew only 0.1 percent, some 617,200 people entered the ranks of the unemployed, which climbed to some 7.3 million, or 6.9 percent of the economically active population, compared with 6.5 percent in 2013.

Joblessness increased even though the employed population rose from 61.2 percent in 2013 to 61.9 percent in 2014, the equivalent of 98.6 million people. The percentage of the employed differed widely, however, between men (73.7 percent) and women (51.2 percent).

But the rise in joblessness did not deter the socalled Gini index, used by the United Nations to measure income inequality, from continuing to contract, as it declined from 0.495 in 2013 to 0.490 in 2014.

The study says that while the illiteracy rate among Brazilians 15 years or older dropped from 8.5 percent in 2013 to 8.3 percent last year, Brazil still has 13.2 million people unable to read or write.

As for technology indicators, for the first time more than half of all Brazilians had access to the Internet, up from 49.4 percent in 2013 to 54.4 percent in 2014.

According to the study, Brazil had a population of 203.2 million in 2014, a growth of 0.9 percent over 2013. The proportion of Brazilians age 60 or over went from 13 percent in 2013 to 13.7 percent last year.