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. However, variants still circulated and led to successive temporary containment measures.
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 working hours. 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). The further harmonised working time measurement, the new variables on the health and migration status, the better defined precision and weighting requirements are other examples of improvements.
Given these new specifications, a break in the LFS data time series occurred between the fourth quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021 for some countries. Break-corrected data were computed back to 2009 (first quarter) and are available for the LFS main indicators (but not for all LFS detailed tables).
Table of contents
1. Hours of work and absences from work
(updated with data until Q3 2021)
2. Employment in detail
(updated with data until Q3 2021)
3. Employed people and job starters by economic activity and occupation
(data on first and second quarters of 2021)
4. Employment
(data on first and second quarters of 2021)
5. Labour market slack
(data on first and second quarters of 2021)
6. Key consequences
(data on four quarters of 2020)
7. Sample size and non-response
(data on four quarters of 2020)