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Venezuela's unemployment rate dropped 1.2 percent in 2015 despite the economic problems facing the country, according to figures released by the government this week.
Officially, the national jobless rate in Venezuela was 6.7 percent between September and October, down from 7.9 percent at the start of the year. However, the current rate is also slightly higher than the same period in 2014, when 6.4 percent of Venezuelans were unemployed.
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The stable employment rate is largely due to the expansion of Venezuela's public sector over the past 15 years, according to political analyst and journalist Rachael Boothroyd Rojas from media collective Venezuelanalysis. The continued stability despite “some serious economic problems,” she told teleSUR from Caracas, is “thanks to government investment in the public sector.”
“Many Venezuelans have managed to move into formal employment from informal employment,” she said. “This has sheltered people from the worst of the country's economic problems, although unfortunately wages haven't kept up with inflation.”
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Planning Minister Ricardo Menendez welcomed the latest figures, saying that they show unemployment has remained at a historic low despite an “economic war.”
The unemployment rate was 15.3 percent in 1999, the minister noted, the year when President Nicolas Maduro's predecessor, Hugo Chavez, first won office.
“If we analyze these figures, there are nearly 9 percentage points separating the current revolutionary government from past (neoliberal governments),” Menendez said.
Both Chavez and Maduro's governments have dramatically expanded Venezuela's public sector, through the nationalization of key industries and by developing a massive network of development and anti-poverty programs.
When Chavez was first elected in 1998, 21 percent of Venezuelans lived in extreme poverty. Today that number is under 5 percent.
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