The strong economic recovery recorded in 2021, with growth of over 6%, was not enough to recover the jobs lost. Of the 49 million jobs that had been lost at the worst moment of the crisis due to the pandemic in the second quarter of 2020, 4.5 million have yet to be recovered.

Nearly 4 million are people who have joined the ranks of the unemployed because of the pandemic crisis. At the beginning of 2022, an estimated 28 million people are looking for work without finding it.

The average regional unemployment rate at the end of 2021 has been estimated at 9.6 percent, which represents an improvement from the 10.6 percent it reached in 2020, but a decline from the 8 percent recorded for 2019, which in this case is used as a reference to calculate the impact of two years of pandemic.

The ILO highlights that the forecast of much slower economic growth in 2022, barely above 2 percent, is a clear indication that it will take longer for the region to emerge from the COVID-19 crisis. In these conditions, and considering the persistence of the pandemic, the ILO estimates that the unemployment rate this year could fall by 0.2 to 0.3 percentage points, remaining above 9%.

This would be insufficient to return to 2019 when, in any case, the labor market situation was far from positive in a region that was already trapped in a scenario of slow growth, low productivity and high levels of informality and inequality.