RIO DE JANEIRO, April 30 (Xinhua) -- Brazil's unemployment rate reached 12.7 percent in the three months to March, Brazil's National Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) said Tuesday.

According to the IBGE, the number of unemployed Brazilians rose to 13.4 million in the first quarter of 2019, up by 1.2 million from the fourth quarter of 2018.

Meanwhile, the number of employed people in Brazil in the first three months of 2019 was 91.9 million, down by 0.9 percent from the quarter ending in December 2018. However, the employment figure was 1.8 percent higher than that registered during the same period in 2018.

?Brazil ended 2018 with an average unemployment rate of 12.3 percent, or 12.8 million jobless people. The growth of unemployment stopped in that year, after having continually increased since 2015 as a result of the economic crisis the South American country had suffered.