The Dominican Republic’s expanded unemployment rate, which includes individuals who actively sought work but were not available, or who did not actively seek work but were available, stood at 10.7% at the end of 2023, representing a year-on-year decrease of 0.3 percentage points, according to the latest report from the Ministry of Economy, Planning and Development (MEPyD). The report highlights that more than 50% of active jobs were informal, Diario Libre points out.
“Despite showing a wider gender gap, this rate is trending downwards, reaching its lowest levels in the last three years (10.6%), 1.4 percentage points lower than those shown during the same period in 2022 (12%)”, underlines the document “Monitoring Employment: An Analysis for 2023”.
The MEPyD indicates that the purpose of the report is to carry out a concise and detailed analysis of the selected policy for labor issues, thus providing a comprehensive vision of the socioeconomic state.
According to the report, the open unemployment rate, a variable that is measured by the quotient of the openly unemployed to the economically active population, stood at 5% in the fourth quarter of 2023, showing a year-on-year increase of 0.2 percentage points.
As for the percentage of job layoffs, it reports that it stood at 4.4%, for a total of 222,867 unemployed people who were actively seeking a new job and only 0.9% of new unemployed people who aspire to have their first job.
The report, which collects information from the labor sector over the past three years, indicates that last year only 46,481 people of working age indicated that they had sought employment.
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Diario Libre
Ministry of Economy
23 July 2024