Short-term employment forecasts based on administrative data on hirings and terminations

This study focuses on the discrepancies in the data on employment trends that have recently emerged between that on hirings and terminations provided by the Ministry of Labour and Social Policies , and workforce survey data, released by Istat . Since January 2015 the former has recorded a substantial increase in hirings, mostly of permanent employees, while according to the latter, employment remained substantially stable in the first months of the year and only started to increase in the second quarter. This is partly explained by the differences in the types of statistics. New jobs starting at the beginning of March, for example, are included among the hirings for the first quarter in the administrative data, but only contribute by one third to the increase in average employment in the period; these contracts, if they continue over time, are not included in the average data until the second quarter. This study proposes to use this temporal correlation to create a simple statistical model that explains the aforementioned discrepancies, and forecasts a year-on-year growth of payroll employees of 1.2 and 1.8 per cent in the third and fourth quarters of this year compared with the same period of 2014.