OVI for March 2018: Tourist season approaching

In March 2018, OVI was 23.6 percent higher compared to March 2017, while seasonally adjusted values, after a mild decline last month, point to a growth on a monthly basis of 2.1 percent. Continued strong growth in labor demand on the Croatian labor market is also evident from OVI’s 29.5 percent growth in the first three months of 2018 compared to the first quarter of last year, and 8 percent growth compared to the last quarter of 2017 (in seasonally adjusted terms).
 
These are all indicators of the approaching tourist season, and the new job openings were primarily related to the tourism sector. Thus the largest contribution to the increased number of online job advertisements in March (23.6 percent) came from the Adriatic region, or more precisely, the Southern Adriatic with 8.5 percentage points and Northern Adriatic with 5.2 percentage points. In terms of occupations, the highest contribution came from job openings for sales assistants (3.7 percentage points), cooks (3.3 percentage points) and waiters (2.6 percentage points). Interestingly, the number of online job advertisements for jobs in the construction sector in March 2018 fell by 5.5 percent compared to March 2017; however, in the first three months of 2018 jobs in construction also recorded a mild growth in labor demand compared to the first quarter of 2017 (20.7 percent).
 

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.