Unemployment rose to 9.2% in January-March trimester

SANTIAGO.- The unemployment rate went up to 9.2% for the January-March trimester, in line with market expectations, informed the National Institute of Statistics (INE) today.

This percentage is higher than the 7.6% registered in the same trimester of 2008 and the 8.5% recorded in the previous period of December 2008- February 2009.

The unemployment rate has gone up over the past 12 months due to the 0.5% decrease in jobs and the 1.3% increase of the work force.

The negative variation in the number of jobs has not been observed since 2001 when the economy was in the midst of recovering from the Asian crisis, which was then followed by seven years of steady growth which peaked in 2008, according to the INE.