The unemployment rate in Costa Rica closed the last quarter of 2022 at 11.7%, a decrease of 2 percentage points compared to the same period of 2021, the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INEC) reported Thursday.
“Despite this decrease on a year-on-year basis, if we go to the closest quarters, we see that unemployment since mid-2022 has hovered around 12% without showing a tendency to increase or decrease,” said INEC spokesman Braulio Villegas.
Unemployment in Costa Rica during this period was higher among women (16%) than among men (8.7%), according to the Continuous Employment Survey corresponding to the October-November-December quarter.
The labor force -active population- reached 2.46 million people and the unemployed totaled approximately 287,000, while informal employment remained at 43.9% in the Central American country.
Unemployment peaked in mid-2020, after the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic, at 24.4%. Since then, the rate has presented
