Non-Working Workers. The Spanish Labour Market under Covid-19

Abstract

We propose in this paper a way of analyzing the evolution of unemployment that considers, besides conventional unemployment rates, unemployment duration, discouraged workers and workers with suspended jobs. Those variables are combined into a synthetic index of non-employment that can be expressed as the product of two components, incidence and severity. We apply this methodology to analyse the evolution of the Spanish labour market during one year with Covid-19. The data show that the behaviour of the job market has been very asymmetric by regions and types of workers. We find that not only incidence and severity are quite heterogeneous across regions and worker types, but also that the evolution between 2019 and 2020 has been different from that corresponding to the financial crisis, with high unemployment regions and older workers suffering less, in terms of incidence and severity.