Brazil's unemployment rate down 7.5% November, surprising analysts

Brazil's unemployment rate went down 7.5 percent in November, lower than the 8 percent analysts expected.

Bloomberg News reported that this good news comes amid the biggest recession the country has experienced in 25 years. The 7.5 percent is a development from October's 7.9 percent.

Thirty seven analysts from Bloomberg expected the unemployment rate to be at 8 percent. Besides the decline in unemployment rate, another indicator of Brazil's resilience that surprised analysts includes the increase of retail sales in October.

The drop of unemployment rate in November may be seasonal, as companies hire more workers in advance to prepare for the holidays. This is according to Haitong in Sao Paulo senior economist Flavio Serrano. However, unemployment rate has only risen three times in November ever since 2001.

"The cumulative effects of the economic downturn that began three or four years ago and deepened during 2015, can be described as a crisis in slow motion," said International Labor Organization (ILO) Regional Director, Jose Manuel Salazar in a report by The Rio Times. ILO released last week its annual report showing that joblessness in Latin America went up 6.7 percent in 2015. That means, 1.7 million are jobless.

Reuters wrote that Brazil's unemployment rate in December 2014 was at a record low of 4.3 percent. It went up this year as companies laid off multitudes of its employees due to recession. There are analysts who went to the point of forecasting jobless rate to go up 10 percent in 2016.

Wages also went down in a steep curve this year, including November. Salaries discounted for inflation were down 1.3 percent from October. It also declined 8.8 percent compared to November last year. These data came from Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE). Salaries are not at an average of $558.59 or 2,177.20 reai a month.

Brazil's economy is seen to shrink further nearly 4 percent this year. It is expected to continue declining to 3 percent in 2016. This will be the longest forecasted decline of the biggest economy in Latin America since the 1930s.