Thursday, December 29, 2005
Jobs, jobs, jobs
The Venezuelan Central Bank took out a huge six page advertisement in the paper today wherein it explained everything that has happened regarding the economy in the past year. Again, no-one can honestly claim this government doesn't make every effort to keep the citizenry well informed on what is going on in the country and what its government is doing.
One piece of information from that report that I found to be interesting is that between November 2004 and November 2005 there were 640,000 new jobs created in Venezuela. That is certainly a significant amount of job creation in a country the size of Venezuela. Furthermore, the engine behind this job creation was the private sector. Of the new jobs only 114,000 were government jobs while 524,000 were private sector jobs. With the creation of all these new jobs the formal sector now accounts for 54% of the workforce which is the highest level that has been since 1993. This means that while some in the opposition like to tout Teodoro Petkoff as some sort of alternative to Chavez the Chavez government now has a greater percentage of workers working in normal jobs with salaries and benefits than Petkoff ever had back when he was running the economy under Caldera.
Lastly, it was reported today that unemployment in the month of December fell to 8.9% which is a dramtica decrease from the over 20% unemployment rate a few years ago during the strike. I haven't seen these numbers so I can't really comment on them but if true they would certainly be good news on top of the already very good news from the Central Bank.
UPDATE According to Panorama newspaper the number of people with jobs increased by more than 230,000 in December alone. Not bad. Now we have to remember that is largely seasonal employment gains related to the Christmas holiday but still it is quite good and there are hundreds of thousands of additional people with jobs. I have posted the Panorama article in the comments section
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One piece of information from that report that I found to be interesting is that between November 2004 and November 2005 there were 640,000 new jobs created in Venezuela. That is certainly a significant amount of job creation in a country the size of Venezuela. Furthermore, the engine behind this job creation was the private sector. Of the new jobs only 114,000 were government jobs while 524,000 were private sector jobs. With the creation of all these new jobs the formal sector now accounts for 54% of the workforce which is the highest level that has been since 1993. This means that while some in the opposition like to tout Teodoro Petkoff as some sort of alternative to Chavez the Chavez government now has a greater percentage of workers working in normal jobs with salaries and benefits than Petkoff ever had back when he was running the economy under Caldera.
Lastly, it was reported today that unemployment in the month of December fell to 8.9% which is a dramtica decrease from the over 20% unemployment rate a few years ago during the strike. I haven't seen these numbers so I can't really comment on them but if true they would certainly be good news on top of the already very good news from the Central Bank.
UPDATE According to Panorama newspaper the number of people with jobs increased by more than 230,000 in December alone. Not bad. Now we have to remember that is largely seasonal employment gains related to the Christmas holiday but still it is quite good and there are hundreds of thousands of additional people with jobs. I have posted the Panorama article in the comments section
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