Employment conditions in Paraguay under the Covid-19 pandemic, years 2020-2021

Abstract

The Covid-19 health crisis in Paraguay deepened the pre-existing social and economic inequality, visibly affecting the most vulnerable social sectors. With the relaxation of social isolation, the resumption of labor activities began partially, producing a slight recovery of employment, although a significant percentage of the economically active population remained without their sources of work. The objective of the research was to describe employment conditions in Paraguay during the Covid-19 pandemic in the years 2020 and 2021. The type of study was descriptive and exploratory with a quantitative and qualitative (mixed) approach. The source of information was the Permanent Continuous Household Survey 2017-2021 of the National Institute of Statistics and other studies. The most outstanding results were: the figures of employed people at the country level for the three quarters of 2021 remains below the figure for the last quarter of 2020. In income, 75.8% of formal and informal workers earning less than the minimum wage in 2019 increased to 78% in 2020, increasing the number of workers with less than the minimum wage. Government actions focused on strengthening existing social programs and creating others; civil society, for its part, resorted to strategies such as soup kitchens, food donations and other solidarity to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. At the end of 2021, uncertainty was the characteristic that was aggravated by an uncertain and pessimistic international economic outlook.