The impact of COVID-19 on exports related jobs

The current COVID-19 pandemic has had drastic and unprecedented impacts on trade, and GDP worldwide and in the EU. We assess in the paper the potential export related jobs losses that would have affected European workers had not governments and the EU implemented large exceptional support packages to prevent real job losses. To this end, we use a global multi-region input output model based on the recently released FIGARO tables (Eurostat, 2021) and build a counterfactual analysis based on trade flows projections made before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. Our results show that in the absence of jobs and enterprise retention measures, 6.4 million exports dependent jobs would have been at risk. Therefore, it is urgent for trade to recover quickly since millions of jobs are at stake.