In Yucatán, unemployment grows due to the pandemic.

Almost a year after the pandemic began in Yucatan, the unemployment rate remained high in the first month of 2021 compared to the same period last year.

MERIDA Yucatan (Times Media Mexico) – Almost a year after the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in Yucatan, its devastating effects continue to hit the job generation in the state: last January, the unemployment rate reached 3.2 percent, the highest in a year; in 2020, in the same month, it was 1.9 percent.

The 3.2 percent figure is one of the highest for the state in the last ten years when Yucatan remained among the three states in the country with the lowest unemployment rate at 1.3 percent.

Last January, the indicator remained 1.5 percentage points below the national average in the state, which was 4.7 percent at the national level, compared to 3.2 percent in Yucatan.

According to the National Occupation and Employment Survey (ENOE), designed and applied by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi), there are 1,91,701 people employed in the state, 56.5 percent of them in the informal sector.

The ENOE revealed that from January 2020 to January 2021, there is a deficit of 14,576 job positions, which translates into a recovery of 51.5 percent of the almost 30,000 lost during the coronavirus’s peak months pandemic last year.

The statistics also reveal that six thousand 371 people left the unemployed population in the first month of the year. At the end of 2020, there were 29 thousand 507 unemployed, compared to the 35 thousand 878 registered in January 2021.

At a national level, Mexico started 2021 with 2.9 million more people in the unemployed ranks, in which the rate rose to 4.7 percent of the Economically Active Population (EAP), which meant an annual increase of 0.9 percentage points.

The sectors that suffered the greatest impact from the loss of jobs were: services, with 2.7 million people employed, while micro-businesses and small establishments reduced their staff by 2.1 million.

61.5 percent of the employed population was concentrated in the services sector; 25.3 percent in the industrial sector; 12.6 percent in primary activities; and 0.6 percent did not specify the activity.