Archive:Labour market in the light of the COVID 19 pandemic - quarterly statistics

The outbreak of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic at the start of 2020 prompted almost all governments around the world to implement restrictive measures, with social distancing playing a key role. Many businesses were temporarily closed and many employed people were confined and isolated in their homes to prevent the spread of the virus.

The health crisis had a significant impact on the economic life and labour market. The lockdown and other health-related measures implied a slowdown in business activity. People may have lost their employment, hiring may have been canceled or frozen, unemployed people may have taken a break in their job search for family reasons, and employed people may have reduced their working hours or simply stopped working for a time.

As massive vaccination campaigns started all around the world in 2021, the situation with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic began to improve gradually in the first quarter of 2021.

This online publication includes articles on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the labour market, using quarterly data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS). It aims to report on specific aspects of the labour market that may have been impacted by the sanitary crisis, such as the labour market slack, which refers to all unmet employment needs (including unemployment), employment, recent job starters and leavers, absences from work, and the number of hours worked prior to and during the crisis. An additional article addresses the methodological issues of sample size and non-response in the LFS quarterly data collection.

A new framework regulation

On 1 January 2021, a new framework regulation entered into force to improve the LFS data collection, namely to further enhance its comparability across countries. The Regulation (EU) 2019/1700, also called the Integrated European Social Statistics Framework Regulation (IESS FR) and its Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/2240 for the labour force domain define the new rules to be followed with regard to the LFS. Particularly important are the flowcharts for the questions to be asked to interviewees and the revised implementing definition for each labour force status (employed, unemployed, and outside the labour force) in accordance with the International Labour Organization's recommendations (ILO), as well as harmonised working time measurement, better defined precision and weighting requirements, and so on. Given these new rules, a break in the LFS data time series is expected between the fourth quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021. Break-corrected data will be provided at the end of 2021.

For this reason, most articles in this online publication still refer to the four quarters of 2020, with presented data in line with the previous regulations (in force until 31 December 2020). LFS data on the first quarter of 2021, collected in accordance with the current regulations (from 1 January 2021), is analysed in the first article Key consequences. The publication will be updated later this year (October 2021) with a comparison of the first and second quarters of 2021. The entire break-corrected data time series will be presented and analysed in early 2022.

Source: Eurostat (lfsi_emp_q)