by Valentina Consiglio and Gavin Jones
ROME (Reuters) – Italy’s labor market has been hit harder than that of most European Union member countries during the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 and 2021, the national statistics office Istat said on Friday.
In 2020, the year the pandemic hit, Italy lost some 724,000 jobs, mostly among agency workers and the self-employed, with permanent job cuts amounting to just 90,000, Istat said. in its annual report.
The employment rate in Italy at the end of 2021 stood at 58.2%, 10.2 points below the EU average, the gap widening from 9.1 points in 2019.
Italy’s gross domestic product returned to roughly its pre-pandemic level at the end of the first quarter of this year, Istat said, after falling 9.0% in 2020 and rebounding 6.6%. Last year.
Despite this recovery in 2021, the number of people living in what Istat calls “absolute poverty”, meaning they cannot afford to buy essential goods and services, stood at 5 .5 million, or 9.4% of the population, tripling since 2005.
(Report by Valentina Consiglio and Gavin Jones; French version Augustin Turpin, edited by Jean-Stéphane Brosse)
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