Unemployment Rates Forecasting with Grey-Based Models in the Post-COVID-19 Period: A Case Study from Vietnam

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has had a significant impact on most countries’ social and economic perspectives worldwide. Unemployment has become a vital challenge for policymakers as a result of COVID-19′s negative impact. Because of the nonstationary and nonlinear nature of the dataset, researchers applied various time series models to forecast the unemployment rate. This study aims to ensure a better forecasting approach for predicting the unemployment rates with an uncertainty of insufficient knowledge and tiny data throughout Vietnam. The study proposes the Grey theory system-based GM (1,1), the Grey Verhulst Model (GVM), and the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model that can more precisely predict unemployment rates. The model’s applications are shown using the Vietnamese unemployment rate at six different rural and urban areas with data sets from 2014–2019. The results indicate that the lower Mean Average Percentage Error (MAPE) values obtained with the GM (1,1) model at all regions for rural and urban areas (excluding Highlands Region in urban area) are extremely encouraging in comparison to other traditional methods. The accurate level of the ARIMA and GVM models follows the GM (1,1) model. The findings of this study show that the effects of the modeling assist policymakers in shaping future labor and economic policies. Furthermore, this study can contribute to the unemployment literature, providing future research directions in the unemployment problems.