According to the consulting firm PwC, salaried employment in the private sector rose from 55.1% of people with registered jobs in 2012 to 47.6% in the first quarter of 2024. The data reflects the decline in the role of the private sector as a generator of employment in Argentina.
He unemployment In Argentina, activity had been on a downward trend since peaking in the second quarter of 2020 (13.1%). That year, due to the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, activity had fallen by 18.9% year-on-year in the second quarter.
Thus, in the fourth quarter of 2023, the minimum of the historical series that began in 2003 was reached, with a percentage of 5.7% of economically active people without employment. A deterioration in terms of the quality of these jobs was also evident.
The counterpart has been the growth of the participation of self-employment (monotributo and social monotributo) which rose from 13.8% in 2012 to the current 20.2%, according to PwC.
For its part, the Public employment also increased its sharefrom 23.8% in 2012 to the current 25.8%. When analysing the structure of employment, it can be seen that the private registered salaried employment sector is stagnating at around 6 million people.
In 2012, the beginning of the series provided by Trabajo, the average number of registered employees reached 6,063,270 people, while in 2023 they totaled 6,364,101 people. This implies a compound annual growth rate of 0.4%, which must be compared with the population growth in the same period (0.9%), giving an indication of the decline in registered employment.
However, at the beginning of 2024, the clarification of economic variables promoted by the new Government led to the reversal of this downward trend.
The price/wage adjustment was not enough to sustain employment. During the first quarter of the year, the economy registered a 5.1% year-on-year drop in output, while the unemployment figure released by INDEC reached 7.7%, which shows an upward break in the series.
Employment work technology
In the first quarter of the year, the number of people with registered jobs – this includes salaried employment in the public and private sectors, employment in private homes, independent work (self-employed and micro-entrepreneurs) – has fallen in seasonally adjusted terms by 0.5% compared to the previous quarter.
Construction is the sector that is feeling the impact of the current economic situation the most, with job losses that had already begun in June of last year and have intensified in the first quarter of 2024.
The number of jobs lost in those ten months was 85,118, half of which were lost between January and March.
The data series indicates that the level reached during the third month of the current year was the lowest since January 2009, excluding 2020, a year in which, due to the pandemic, the crisis in the sector was historic.
Source: Ambito
