Unemployment in Costa Rica was 17.7% in the moving quarter from March to May 2021, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Census (Inec).
This represents a small increase (0.4 percentage points) compared to the moving quarter from February to April.
Compared to the same quarter of last year, unemployment in Costa Rica has decreased by 2.4 percentage points. This represents 104,000 more people in the workforce, per INEC.
Women continue to have a higher unemployment rate than men — 24.2% and 13.3%, respectively. The total population considered as unemployed is 431,000 people, which “remains without statistically significant variation compared to the same moving quarter of the previous year.”
Meanwhile, the INEC calculated the underemployment rate — the percentage of employed people who work fewer than 40 hours a week and want to work more hours — at 15.7%, unchanged from last year.
Unemployment in Costa Rica had reached 12% in March 2020, already one of the highest levels recorded in the country until then, but it soared to 24% due to the impact of the pandemic in the moving quarter from May to July 2020.
