Covid-19 and regional employment in Europe

Key takeaways

• We construct employment risk indices for European regions that reflect the share of jobs under threat from Covid-19. The risk index is based on local employment in sectors that are more exposed to the pandemic and on the regional incidence of small firms.
• Employment in regions in southern Europe and France is shown to have high risk indices, while regions in northern Europe have lower risk indices. Eastern and central European regions have intermediate risk indices.
• Regions with a higher risk index have a bigger jump in Google searches for unemployment-related terms.

Data behind Graph 2