Employment Strategies to Respond to COVID-19: Characterizing Input-Output Linkages of a Targeted Sector

On the conceptual account, this paper develops a methodology to identify input-output (IO)layers of a targeted sector, drawing on backward and forward multipliers of an IO matrix. On the implementation account, the methodology is applied to a sample of eight countries - China, Japan, India, Russia, Germany, Turkey, UK and USA, which together account for about 60 percent of the world GDP - with a view to characterizing the backward and forward linkages of manufacturing, real estate, wholesale, and accommodation sectors identified by ILO (2020) as key sectors likely to suffer from the highest level of youth unemployment due to the COVID-19 pandemic. New information is generated for the design of informed employment policy interventions to avoid the unemployment projected. The findings show that manufacturing sector, MA2, is vital for all the countries examined, followed by EST and WHS, and that these three sectors need to be coupled with at least one other sectors to capture the external employment effects from the interacting communities (or clusters).