Argentina’s Tech Firms Lead Job Recovery Amid Company Exodus

[MilHojas]

Argentina’s Tech Firms Lead Job Recovery Amid Company Exodus

(Bloomberg) -- Argentina’s tech sector is a bright spot that’s adding jobs even as many companies shut down in a hostile environment of anti-business policies, high inflation and lack of access to international credit markets. Most Read from BloombergReliving the New York Subway Map DebateChina...

finance.yahoo.com

 

[dilmah]

Am I reading their graphs right?
Entire Argentina (45+ million people) has only 500k people employed in private sector??

 

[elhombresinnombre]

Am I reading their graphs right?
Entire Argentina (45+ million people) has only 500k people employed in private sector??

Mercopress thinks 5,807,200 people were employed by the private sector in 2020.

In Argentina, 55% of all registered workers are employed by government

Public sector jobs have soared in recent years in Argentina, and from a relation of 42 every 100 registered workers, white and blue-collar, back in 2012, it has jumped to 55 currently. This means that in the 2012/2017 period, the creation of government-paid jobs was larger than the overall...

en.mercopress.com

Quote: However given the slowing down of the Argentine economy with no growth since 2012 and recession in 2018, has meant that in April 2020, the overall private sector employment stood at 5,807,200, that is 261,000 less than in 2012 and with an overall participation of 49,3%.

 

[toast]

While I am no labor economist, I feel the Mercopress summary misrepresents the situation. They reveal data on registered jobs in both private and public domains, which is reasonable, as those numbers are available. They don't bring in an estimate of informal workforce participation. If the informal sector is added to the private side, the public employment, while high, and a chronic ball and chain on all things economic in Argentina, is not as large in relation to overall labor force participation as portrayed in the Mercopress article.

 

[elhombresinnombre]

I think you are right. I've seen figures suggesting that somewhere between 45-55% are working in the informal economy. I just picked the article because its five million is an order of magnitude larger than the original quoted number.

However....
After actually getting around to reading the article and looking at the graphs I can see that I'm comparing apples with oranges here. The Bloomberg feature is in fact citing the number of employers in the country.