EMPLOYMENT INEQUALITIES IN A TIME OF CRISIS

Creative economy sectors in Brazil in the 2010s

Abstract

In the mid-2010s, Brazil suffered an inflection in economic performance accompanied by the adoption of a policy of fiscal austerity. In this article, the discussion of this issue focuses on what happens to the creative economy, which refers to the production, transaction and consumption of goods and services whose value is constituted by their originality or authenticity, being discussed internationally today in the midst of future alternatives. The objective is to monitor the impacts of this crisis on employment performance in sectors linked to the creative economy in Brazil. Different sources of documents on industrial policies and official statistical databases are used, especially the Relação Anual de Informações Sociais of the Ministry of Labor and Employment of Brazil (RAIS-MTE), considering the period between 2010 and 2019. Companies and jobs in sectors linked to this economy grew, in the first half of 2010, more than in other economic sectors, although they still represented a small part of the economic activity as a whole. In the second half of the decade, this performance changed, with a retraction and then a stagnation in the level of employment in the sectors studied. The quality of employment also suffered. The crisis in the Brazilian economy as a whole was combined with an inflection in sectoral policy, affecting more significantly certain strata of employment in the creative economy: in the North and Northeast regions, in large companies, in primary and secondary education, among young people and in the women. This reversed previous expectations that had been established in terms of reducing employment inequalities.