OVI for September 2021: Labor market recovery continues, more workers in demand than before the pandemic

October 6, 2021

The latest OVI index values, as well as other economic indicators in the past few months, provide reasons to be optimistic. Labor demand is above its 2020 and 2019 levels. OVI index for September 2021 shows that labor demand is some 55 percent higher than in September 2020 and some 11 percent higher compared to the pre-pandemic September 2019. This is the fifth consecutive month in which labor demand is higher than in the pre-pandemic months. These favorable movements are also evident on the quarterly level. In the third quarter this year, labor demand is some 57 percent higher compared to the third quarter of 2020 and some 19 percent higher compared to the pre-pandemic third quarter of 2019. When comparing the first nine months, labor demand measured by the OVI index in 2021 is around one percent higher than labor demand in the first nine months of the pre-pandemic 2019.
 

 

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.