Unemployment rate rises to 5.7% in March

The unemployment rate rose to 5.7% in March, with Statistics Portugal (INE) lowering the figure for February to 5.6%, according to data released this Monday. The statistics office stressed that there was a reduction in the employed population compared to the previous month.

In March, the unemployment rate stood at 5.7%, “up 0.1 pp from the previous month, down 0.1 pp from three months before and down 0.9 pp from a year before,” explains INE. In February, the unemployment rate reached its lowest value of the last ten years.

The scenario is different depending on the comparison with the previous month or with the same period in the previous year. The unemployed population, which comprises 295.9 thousand people, “increased by 1,2% from the previous month, having decreased both from December 2021 (2.2%) and from March of the same year (11.5%),” says INE.

Also in the employed population (4 877.3 thousand) there was a decrease of 0.2% compared to the previous month and compared to three months earlier, but an increase of 3.7% in relation to the same month in 2021.

The labour underutilisation rate was estimated at 11.1% for the month of March, corresponding to 593.1 thousand people. It reached in February 2022 the lowest value since the beginning of 2011.