As of this Monday, August 22, Panama becomes the third country in the Latin American and Caribbean region to formally initiate the implementation of a Technical Cooperation Agreement between the Ministry of Labor and Labor Development (Mitradel) and the International Labor Organization. (ILO), which aims to develop a Labor Market Statistics Information System (SIME).
To finalize details in this regard, the Director of the Mitradel Labor Market Observatory (OLM), Moisés Véliz and Horacio Barría, coordinator of the Labor Information and Analysis System for Latin America and the Caribbean (SIALC), met today, together with the ILO consultant , Bolívar Pino and the economist Gustavo García, official of the (OLM).
According to Véliz, this is an ambitious project that has an administrative and a technical component in which other State institutions dedicated to the production, collection and dissemination of statistical data on the labor market will be involved, concentrating on a database, all inter-institutional information with the purpose of being able to count on more reliable data that serve to carry out analyses, evaluations and studies that allow public policy decisions to be made in relation to the labor market.
Its duration will be a year and a half and with the technical assistance of the ILO it will allow to have an important list of labor indicators such as unemployment, informality and other essential for the elaboration of the analyzes corresponding to the labor market, worker training, and the needs future employment in the country.
To date, only two countries in the region, Ecuador and Chile, have implemented this system, while Uruguay, Panama and the Dominican Republic are in process, and Guatemala has also shown interest in it, said the SIALC-ILO coordinator.
The project will benefit all sectors that will be able to count on specialized information about the labor market and decent work indicators, SDGs, administrative records through a friendly platform that is easy to consult.
After pondering the valuable experience of the ILO with Mitradel, in terms of technical cooperation, Barría announced that the project consultant has already delivered a schedule of the activities to be implemented and is currently under review by the Ministry of Labor.
In today’s meeting, ILO specialists also participated virtually, where regional employment statistics were reviewed, among other relevant issues for the development of SIMEL.
