OVI for February 2019: Strong growth in labor demand in the southern Adriatic

March 4, 2019

After a very low annual growth rate in the first month of this year, in February OVI recorded an 8.7 percent growth compared to the same month of the previous year, which suggests a continued labor demand growth on an annual level. Seasonally adjusted index values are also positive and they show that the number of job advertisements grew by 4.7 percent in February compared to the previous month. Labor market indicators usually follow GDP movements with a time lag, but it seems that the labor market has not yet felt the consequences of the slower GDP growth rate, which amounted to 2.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018, lower than the rates recorded in the previous quarters.

The largest increase in number of job advertisements on an annual level was recorded for hotel/hospitality staff, repair workers, and warehouse workers, while the largest decrease was recorded for programmers, cooks, and bricklayers. In February, 40 percent of the job advertisements required secondary level of education, and most of the openings were for fixed-term employment (44.8 percent). With regards to location, most of the advertisements were for jobs in central Croatia, while the southern Adriatic came in second place, although it accounted for the highest positive contribution in February to the total growth in number of job advertisements on an annual level. The number of advertisements from February 2018 to February 2019 in the southern Adriatic grew by as much as 20.6 percent, mostly as a result of increased demand for hotel/hospitality staff, waiters, repair workers, cleaners, and carpenters.

 

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.