UNEMPLOYMENT AND WORKFORCE SKILL LEVELS IN BRAZIL

ABSTRACT

Inspired by the theories of the Job Search and the Human Capital, this paper investigates the Brazilian job market with a view to analyze unemployment in Brazil between 2002 and 2011. It focuses the workforce skill levels and is based on data from the monthly employment survey published by IBGE. A dynamic analysis was conducted, which allowed interpreting the changes in the labor market based on the probability of an individual to transition among the conditions of employment, unemployment and inactivity. Two methods were employed in this investigation: a univariate study of transition matrices, which were applied to each of the microeconomics aspects considered and a multivariate econometrics analysis derived from a Multinomial Logit model. Several important results were found. Primarily, variables such as sex, role in the family, age and education have been found to have a significant influence on one's success in job search. The results reveal that the higher the level of education a worker has, the lower the influence of the aforementioned variables on the success of this worker's job search. Furthermore, those workers considered semi-qualified are the most sensitive to the influence of said traits on their chances of employment. Finally, the study shows that individuals in the group considered less qualified benefited the most from the changes in the Brazilian job market during the period under study. The results give an important contribution to the advancement of the literature on the subject, since most of the existing studies use a cross-sectional analysis of national household surveys, pointing only to static unemployment rates.

KEYWORDS:
job market; job search; human capital; qualification; dynamic analyses