OVI for March 2021: Significant recovery, labor demand nearly back to the prepandemic level of March 2019

April 6, 2021

In March 2021, the labor market showed the first significant signs of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. The OVI index for March 2021 indicates that labor demand was nearly 24 percent higher than in March 2020, which is the first growth in the last year. However, we should bear in mind that the impact of the pandemic was already visible in March of last year, because the OVI index in March 2020 was 23 percent lower compared to March 2019. A comparison of the OVI index from March of this year and the index from March 2019 shows that labor demand is at about 95 percent of its prepandemic level. On a quarterly level, OVI recorded negative growth rates in the first quarter of 2021—8.5 percent compared to the first quarter of 2020 and 18 percent compared to the first quarter of 2019—which is expected, because most of the first quarter of 2020 was not impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
 

What is OVI?

Online Vacancy Index (OVI) is a monthly index of online job advertisements developed by the Institute of Economics, Zagreb in cooperation with the web portal MojPosao. The index aims to provide timely information regarding current labor demands. OVI index is developed by means of simple enumeration of single new job advertisements whose application deadlines end within the same month for which the index is being calculated. Given that advertisements published by only one web portal are taken into account, the number of job advertisements is expressed as an index (with the base year being 2015). 

The index is to be interpreted in such a way that the values greater than 100 represent growth when compared to 2015, and accordingly, that the values less than 100 represent a decrease with respect to the base year. Index is seasonally adjusted using the X-12-ARIMA method.