In the month of March of this year, the recovery of the labor market in Colombia in the post-pandemic period, which began in 2021, was interrupted. Indeed, in the interval between the month of March of the last two years, the employment rate decreased by 1.2 percentage points, while the unemployment rate rose by 1.3 points, which means a drop in employment generation of 149,000 people and the loss of 339,000 jobs. So far this year, there has been a substantial improvement, with the employment of Colombian workers and employees approaching 23 million people, despite the maximum unemployment peak of 12.7 percent, reached in January 2024 – in this month the employment fell to 22 million and unemployment to 3.1 million people -, after single-digit unemployment achieved in the second half of 2023, which kept the unemployed population at around 2.3 million.
When examining the gender gap of the main indicators of the labor market, of those who join this market and find a job or lack it, in the period of March 2023/March 2024, it was found that instead of shortening, it widens , both on a national scale and at the level of the main cities and metropolitan areas. The employment situation of women has not improved and is increasingly moving away from male standards, from which they are separated by 23.9 points in hiring and 5.5 points in dismissals. Suffice it to cite an example: while in the country the male unemployment rate was 8.9 percent, the female unemployment rate was 14.4 percent.
If this is the national panorama in the month of March, the performance of the labor market in the first quarter of the year shows a different trajectory, however despite a slight reduction in the employment rate between January-March 2023 and the same period of 2024, which was compressed from 56.4 to 56.1 percent, there was a slight rebound of 215,000 new positions, which contrasts with the trend of unemployment and underemployment, which increased by 81,000 and 54,000 jobs.
Among the 23 cities included in the DANE survey, the extremes of unemployment range between Quibdó with the highest rate observed (29.7 percent) in the January-March quarter and Bogotá (10.6 percent), placing Tunja in the intermediate band (13.2 percent), occupying eleventh place.
After the economic contraction caused by the pandemic in the 2020-2021 period, which precipitated the labor market into free fall, in 2022 this collapse was reversed, however, coinciding with the beginning of the new municipal administration, in the first In the quarter of 2024, the pace of job creation contracted moderately (0.5 points) and the number of unemployed workers increased by two thousand people, while the “rebusque” decreased by 1,000 Tunjanos.
