This page presents indicators that track the recovery of the labour market from COVID-19.
Overview
- COVID-19 has emphasized the complexity and diversity of the labour market – and the need to look at a broad range of measures to assess labour market health.
- One way to do this is to examine indicators along three different dimensions, with each capturing a different type of slack: overall conditions, job characteristics and inclusiveness.1, 2
- The indicators below follow this approach and will be updated as the labour market recovery from the pandemic proceeds.3
- The recovery of each indicator is depicted as progress bars, where the current value of a measure is compared with its crisis trough and a benchmark value (2019 monthly average). Halfway progress implies that the measure has recovered half of the trough-benchmark distance.4
Chart 1: Overall labour market conditions
Chart 2: Job characteristics
Chart 3: Inclusiveness of the labour market
a. Unemployment rate
b. Labour force participation rate
c. Sectoral mix of jobs
Endnotes
- 1. This approach follows that of E. Ens, L Savoie-Chabot, K. G. See and S. L. Wee, “Assessing Labour Market Slack for Monetary Policy,” Bank of Canada Staff Discussion Paper No. 2021-15 (October 2021).[←]
- 2. See Ens et al for a full detailed description of each indicator and its construction. For this webpage, unit labour cost is calculated as labour income divided by GDP at market prices.[←]
- 3. Note that a recovery of the labour market to pre-pandemic levels is not the same as the concept of maximum sustainable employment. See page 19 of Ens et al for more details.[←]
- 4. Measures which have fully recovered and which exceed their 2019 levels have their percentage recovery capped at 120%.[←]