BUENOS AIRES – Some 100,000 jobs were lost in Argentine during the first quarter of this year due to the impact of the global recession, according to a report released Tuesday by the private Institute for Argentine Development.

Idesa, as the entity is known, said that the 8.4 percent unemployment rate during the first quarter of 2009 released by the government’s Indec statistics agency “is not believable.”

The Indec information “collides” with “other evidence” that is accumulating daily about layoffs, worker suspensions and even business closings, Idesa said.

Indec says unemployment came in 1.1 percentage points above the level registered during the previous quarter of October-December 2008.

In its report, Idesa said that the loss of jobs at the beginning of the year “is a regularity that has been repeated for a decade in very dissimilar economic and labor contexts.”

It said that in the first quarter of every year, there is usually a lower rate of employment compared with the previous quarter because of the austral summer vacations taken by workers.

Indec has been going through a credibility crisis since early 2007 when it introduced methodological changes in the way inflation is measured which have been called into question along with other key indicators, such as the poverty rate. EFE