Santo Domingo.-The labor market has recovered from the onslaught left by the COVID-19 pandemic, generating 706,238 jobs from 2020 to the end of 2023, reaching a total of 4,952,977 employed people. However, challenges persist, such as informality, regional inequality, and workers who, despite being employed, live on less than 125.67 pesos a day.
According to the Ministry of Economy, Planning and Development (MEPyD) report on employment in 2023, there were some 260,258 unemployed people in the country, willing to work or making specific efforts to enter the labor market, with residents in the eastern region being the most affected.
Of this number, some 222,867 people were unemployed, that is, people who had previously had a job but were actively seeking employment at the time of the survey. Meanwhile, some 46,481 people were newly unemployed, that is, they were seeking employment for the first time.
The study states that during the period studied, open unemployment, which is measured by the ratio of openly unemployed to the economically active population, stood at 5% in the fourth quarter of 2023, showing a year-on-year increase of 0.2 percentage points.
While expanded unemployment, which additionally includes the Potential Labor Force (people who sought work but are not available or did not seek work but are available), stood at 10.7%, for a year-over-year reduction of 0.3 percentage points.
Both unemployment rates (open and expanded) show a greater disparity at the regional level, with the southern region showing values of 16.8% in 2023, while the northern region closed the year at 7.9%. The other regions, metropolitan and eastern, reached levels of 12.4% and 10.7%, respectively.
The report states that at the end of 2023, some 4,952,977 people were employed. Of these, 48.6% (2,404,955 employed) were in the informal sector, higher than the 46.6% (2,307,660 employed) in the formal sector, the report states.
Job position
– Domestic work
Some 240,363 people are engaged in domestic service work. This group of employed people showed an accumulated growth of 11.6%, increasing the number of employed people to 24,925 compared to 2020, according to the MEPyD.
