This work investigates movement between the states of the labor market - occupation, unemployment and inactivity - and the duration of unemployment in the Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Region, between 1997 and 2001, using panel data from IBGE’s Monthly Employment Survey (PME). Among the individual characteristics, the results show that the behavior of unemployment for young people and women is much more affected by the higher incidence of these groups in this state. This is so because greater intensity and longer stays are observed for these groups in the other two states, unemployment and inactivity, than by long periods of unemployment. Individuals with higher education levels who had signed labor contracts in their last jobs were the hardest hit by long-term unemployment. The selectiveness of the labor market, precarious labor relations and the behavior of economic activity in this region contribute to the increase in both unemployment and in turnover among groups with less stability in the labor market. The study concludes that the phenomenon of unemployment in the BH Metropolitan Area is affected not only by individual factors, but also by economic activity, thus confirming what the employment search models predicted.
unemployment; mobility; survival models
