Abstract
The falling in production and income due to the COVID-19 pandemic will cause a wide impact on employment. The outcome will depend on the reactivity of the labor market to economic shocks. Specifically, in this work, we propose an analysis to estimate the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the employment level in the Italian macro-regions: North-West, North-East, Centre, and Mezzogiorno. Using the employment elasticity indicator for the 2015–2019 period, we can observe that the elasticity of employment is greater in the Mezzogiorno in respect to other areas. This result suggests that the job loss in Mezzogiorno will be proportionally higher even if the reduction in income will be lower. The data showed that in southern Italy, the newly unemployed could be a number between 405,000 to more than half a million. Indeed, the estimation of employment elasticity of GDP suggests that the COVID-19 crisis could determine a decline in the occupation rate in the South of 0.83 for each point of GDP loss, which has no comparison with the other Italian regions. These results, due to the particular structure of the southern economy—characterized by low aggregate demand and small dimensions of firms—suggest necessary changes in economic paradigms with respect to the neoclassical approach adopted in the past 20 years. Demand-driven policies, such as basic income and labor redistribution, could avoid or mitigate the socioeconomic tragedy caused by the COVID-19 crisis.
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Notes
- 1.
One of the possible explanations is the presence of the Lazio region in Centre Italy, which has an enormous concentration of public employees due to the presence of constitutional bodies and ministries. The public employment is insensitive to output variations due to the impossibility to dismiss for redundancy. However, this point needs further investigations, which represent avenues for future research.
- 2.
The first data (7.90%) is estimated by SVIMEZ (2020), while the second (8.56%) and third (12.23%) percentages are our elaborations based respectively on the projections of the IMF (2020) and the Bank of Italy (2020) at the national level, taking into account the proportions with respect to Svimez’s forecasts for the South.
- 3.
There is in this moment in Italy a form of basic income, called “Reddito di Cittadinanza”[citizens’ income] but it has a lot of limits, particularly because it is not compatible with a regular job and then, paradoxically, it finishes being an incentive to work again in the shadow (Perri, 2018).
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Perri, S., Di Santo, G. (2021). The Effects of COVID-19 Crisis on the Southern Italian Labor Market: Employment Elasticity Estimation Approach. In: Bilgin, M.H., Danis, H., Demir, E., García-Gómez, C.D. (eds) Eurasian Business and Economics Perspectives. Eurasian Studies in Business and Economics, vol 19. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77438-7_18
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