THEcoronavirus epidemic it will have an "unprecedented" effect on the Italian labor market. The Bank of Italy writes it in an analysis entitled "The short-term impact of Covid-19 on job search".
According to the researchers of Via Nazionale, the consequences of the pandemic risk being paradoxical. The datum that currently records the most marked decline, in fact, is that of people looking for employment. This collapse, at a statistical level, will mitigate the increase of unemployment rate, but obviously this is not positive news, because at the same time it will also drop significantly the number of employees.
Researchers Francesco D'Amuri and Eliana Viviano have taken it as a reference monthly job search history series via Google, since “these indicators have been shown to be excellent predictors of the evolution of unemployment, particularly in phases of economic cycle inversion”. Well, from the March data it emerges “a sharp reduction in job search activity", really of 39%, and “the fall remains significant even if we take into account the high volatility of the indicator: it is five times the standard deviation of the series in prime differences”.
On the other hand, in theory the collapse of people looking for work through Google “could be due to an increase in overall search activity on the search engine following the Covid-19 epidemic – the study continues – for example why greater availability of free time to spend at home may have led to an increase in Google search activity for keywords unrelated to the job search, driving up the index denominator”.
To dispel this doubt, the two Bank of Italy experts analyzed the trend of some "particularly popular keywords related to social media, entertainment and news for the last 90 days". It emerged that "the values of these indicators for March are substantially in line with those of the previous months". This means that there was no surge in overall search volume last month, consequently the collapse of those related to work is indicative of a trend in its own right.
As a counter-evidence, economists have also checked the trend of research related to mobility sectors or to sites of sports news. “There is no doubt that interest in these keywords should have dropped markedly due to the blocking unnecessary travel and suspension of sporting events – concludes the analysis – The drops recorded (respectively -50% and -31%) are not far from that found for the job search index (-39%)”.
