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Uruguay The Urban Poor
The urban poor were concentrated among the unemployed,
those
working in the informal sector of the economy, unskilled
laborers, and retired persons. Official unemployment
figures for
Montevideo fluctuated from around 8 percent to 15 percent
in the
1980s. Estimates of the proportion of the labor force in
the
informal sector were, by definition, hard to find. But the
proportion has certainly been rising since the 1960s. At
the
height of the building boom of the late 1970s and early
1980s,
about 6 percent of the labor force was employed in
construction,
a highly cyclical (and thus unstable) source of jobs. In
addition, the real value of state pensions was severely
eroded in
the 1960s and 1970s, leading to widespread misery among
the
elderly.
Since 1985 the level of unemployment has remained below
10
percent in Montevideo, and the government has made modest
efforts
to restore some of the erosion in the real value of
pensions
(see The Sanguinetti Government
, ch. 3). However, the informal
sector
of the economy has continued to grow.
Data as of December 1990
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