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

Abstract At present, the world is facing an unprecedented employment challenge due to the COVID-19 pandemic. ILO (2020) expects the largest amount of youth unemployment at the global level to take place in manufacturing, real estate, wholesale, and accommodation sectors. This paper aims to produce information for employment strategy development in China, Japan, India, Russia, Germany, Turkey, UK and USA, which together account for about 60 percent of the world GDP. A novel method is introduced to identify critical input-output backward and forward linkages of a targeted sector. Based on the linkages identified, sectoral dependencies and pathways of interactions in a production system are characterized to uncover critical information for the design of employment policy interventions. Manufacturing is found to be top priority sector to be targeted in all the eight countries, followed by real estate and wholesale sectors, and these sectors should be coupled with isolated communities of sectors to capture external employment effects.