One of President Danilo Medina’s main campaign promises in the run up to the 2012 elections was to create 400,000 jobs in four years. In his state of the nation address on Saturday, 27 February 2016 Medina announced that he expected this target to be reached by the end of his current term.
However, although this sounds like a great achievement, it has hardly made a dent in the unemployment rate, according to economist Miguel Ceara Hatton of the PRM opposition party. Ceara says that according to Central Bank statistics, the unemployment rate was 14.7% at the end of 2012 and at the end of 2015 it remained at 14%.
In addition, according to the economist who is also a former head of the United Nations Human Development Program (UNDP) in the country, the number of people of working age has fallen by more than a million over the same period. Ceara says that the database selection that the Central Bank used for the working age population consisted of everyone over the age of 10, but this has now changed to 15 and over, which accounts for the decrease in the working population figure.
http://www.diariolibre.com/economia/bc-desempleo-fue-14-en-2015-aun-con-400-mil-empleos-nuevos-XE2886022
