Unemployment in Colombia at 12.7% in January

Unemployment in Colombia increased to 12.7% of the workforce in January. This marks a 2.7% rise from the December 2023 figures. Leonardo Trujillo, Deputy Director of the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), noted that a seasonal rise in unemployment rates during the first month of the year is typical for Colombia.

A year ago, in January 2023, unemployment in Colombia was 13.7%, one point higher than last month. In this context, DANE reported that there are currently 3.1 million unemployed people in the country, with a reduction of 220,000. On the other hand, the employment rate varied from 54.7% to 55.3%.

The data

By gender, in 2024, for the national total, the unemployment rate for men was 10.4% and for women 15.9%, which is equivalent to a gap of 5.5 percentage points. The city with the highest unemployment is Quibdo, the capital of the department of Choco, followed by Riohacha, in La Guajira, and Florencia, in the department of Caqueta.

The levels of informality, that is, jobs that are not subject to a labor contract and which are traditionally very important in the country, for January 2024 reached 55.7%, achieving a reduction of 2.1 percentage points compared to the figure for 2023, which was 57.9%.

Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, analyzing these results, highlighted the “significant drop” in informality. “It is interesting to highlight that the seasonally adjusted rate breaks the upward trend and stands at 10.4% for this month, that informality continues to fall, and that this fall is statistically significant,” wrote the president in his social networks in a long commentary.

For the head of state, agriculture, livestock, hunting and fishing are the sectors that are driving the growth for January 2024 and is “in line with the growth of the occupational position of day laborer or laborer, (the gain) being much more relevant for men than for women, but it is positive for both sexes. The unemployed population also decreases in the national total and most of it happens in the 13 cities and their metropolitan areas”.