Wage Rigidity and Labour Market Changes in the Context of the Pandemic – The Case of Romania

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all economic sectors, and the shocks have been felt strongly in the labour market. The objective of this paper is to identify the trends on the Romanian labour market, to approximate and evaluate the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the sectors of activity and, implicitly, on the employees of these sectors. In order to carry out this analysis, relevant indicators are used for the evolution of the salary and the number of employees, for the period January 2016 - October 2021. After this section, the analysis is focused on the period 2020-2021, when the entire society faced the negative effects generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, the disproportionate impact of the crisis at the level of the labour force is highlighted, the employees working in the Manufacturing sector being the most severely affected, almost half of the jobs lost during the lockdown period being in this sector. Another sector that was strongly impacted by measures to prevent the spread of the virus is Accommodation and food service activities. However, in this case, the number of employees returned in 2021 to the value recorded in the pre-pandemic period.