OVI for June 2020: Labor demand is recovering, but it is still 26 percent lower than in June of last year
July 16, 2020
OVI in June shows that labor demand has continued to gradually recover from the break in economic activities caused by the coronavirus pandemic. In June 2020, labor demand was 26 percent lower than in June 2019. Although this is a significant fall, the drop in June is relatively low compared to May and April, when, compared to the same months in 2019, labor demand fell by 57.4 and 74.7 percent, respectively. The demand for traditionally most sought-after occupations – sales persons, waiters, and cooks – fell in June by 42.3, 10, and 2.3 percent, respectively, when compared to the same month last year.
Total labor demand data for the second quarter, when labor demand is usually the highest, expectedly point to a drastic drop. Compared to the second quarter of 2019, labor demand fell by 53.2 percent in the second quarter of 2020. On a quarterly level, labor demand fell for nearly all occupations, particularly in the service sector, except for those occupations responding to the earthquake in Zagreb and the pandemic. More precisely, in the second quarter of 2020 demand rose only for nurses, bricklayers, doctors and dentists, carpenters, and construction workers.
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.