At the end of the government of President Luis Guillermo Solís employment indicators warn about a growth in unemployment.
According to the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INEC), there is a statistically significant drop in the percentage of working-age employed population (51.8%), when compared with the same quarter of 2017.
The male employment rate fell by 1.7 percentage points, while the female employment rate fell by 2.8 percentage points. The employment rate for men was 66.3%, while for women it was 37.1%.
By area, 1.48 million of the employed people reside in urban areas (52.1%), and 520 thousand employed people reside in rural areas (50.9%). The occupation rate decreased in both areas: 2.5 percentage points in urban areas and 1.6 percentage points in rural areas, compared to the first quarter of 2017.
For the first quarter of 2018 there is a significant incorporation of people into the unemployed workforce with a high school diploma (23 thousand people), without work experience (12 thousand people), and young people aged 15 to 24 years old (15 thousand people), which contributes to the increase in the unemployment rate.