OVI for January 2018: Growth in labor demand, especially in northern Adriatic, while eastern Croatia is lagging behind

 

 
In January 2018, the OVI index rose by 42.2 percent when compared to the same month of the previous year, indicating continued strong growth in labor demand. Seasonally adjusted index values point to the same conclusion, as the seasonally adjusted index rose by 12.4 percent, which is the third highest growth rate in the last twelve months, after October and May of 2017. On a regional basis, compared to the same month last year, in January 2018 the highest growth rate (52.1 percent) was recorded in the northern Adriatic region, which includes the counties of Istria, Primorje-Gorski Kotar and Lika-Senj, while the lowest growth in job advertisements (19.1 percent) was observed in eastern Croatia, including Osijek-Baranja, Virovitica-Podravina, Požega-Slavonia, Vukovar-Srijem and Brod-Posavina counties. The southern Adriatic region (Dubrovnik-Neretva, Split-Dalmatia, Šibenik-Knin and Zadar counties) and central Croatia (all other counties) experienced a similar increase in number of job advertisements, by 40.6 and 40.8 percent, when compared to January 2017.
 

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.