By IANS/EFE,
Rio de Janeiro : Brazil created a record 2.52 million new jobs last year, the most since the statistics were first registered in 1992, the labour ministry has said.
The number surpassed the 1.61 million jobs the nation generated in 2007, which was the previous high until now. There were only 990,000 new jobs created in 2009 when the country was suffering the effects of the global economic crisis.
In the last two months of 2010, however, the number of layoffs was greater than the number of hirings.
The vigorous expansion of employment has been attributed to the solid growth of the country’s economy in 2010, estimated at 7.3 percent.
While economists had estimated that Brazil was going to end the year 2010 with 2.2 million new jobs, the labour ministry released a figure significantly higher.
Labour Minister Carlos Lupi said with December’s results included, 15.04 million new jobs were generated in the country during the eight-year presidency of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who left office Jan 1 this year.
Brazil is likely to create close to three million new jobs in 2011, the first year of the Dilma Rousseff government, he said.