Understanding the Post COVID-19 Labor Market in Latin America and the Caribbean

January 28, 2022 by Pedro Gagliardi , Eugenia Valdez Tamayo
LinkedIn Jobs and Development COVID-19

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Challenge

The Covid-19 Labor Markets Observatory, managed by the Inter-American Development Bank Labor Markets Division, aimed to understand how COVID-19 has affected labor markets in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Solution

The Observatory leveraged LinkedIn data to understand the fluctuations of hiring rates in different sectors across Latin America and the Caribbean. These insights are a valuable source of information that complements traditional statistics on labor dynamics. The availability of data, particularly of trends on the skills needed for different occupations, is a valuable source of information on the pandemic’s effects on the job market.

Impact

LinkedIn’s hiring rate dataset showed an overall recovery in professional employment. This data complemented other traditional information sources (like household surveys) included in the observatory. The combination of both datasets provided a rich overview of the labor market dynamics in the whole region.

Some of the conclusions are:

• From May 2020 to May 2021, all countries started evidencing a fast recovery.
• In April 2021, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico had almost recovered their pre-pandemic hiring rate levels.
• By May 2021, Argentina, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Brazil, and Chile show hiring rates higher than in February 2020, which is in line with the relatively small losses in formal and highly educated employment observed at the end of 2020.
• LinkedIn data showed that for Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Chile and Mexico Software and Information Technology Services, Nonprofit, Finance and Retail trade sectors had the smallest reduction in hiring rate during the pandemic when compared with other between March 2020 to April 2021
• In contrast, LinkedIn hiring rates for Recreation & Travel, Education, Public Administration, and Design Industries were the most severely affected have not recovered to the levels seen in the pre-pandemic for the countries mentioned above at the same time period

To further understand how LinkedIn data served this initiative, you can visit the full report on the Observatory Website as well as find insights on its public data repository.

Read more

https://blogs.iadb.org/conocimiento-abierto/en/development-data-partnership-case-study/
https://observatoriolaboral.iadb.org/en/