NI Jobs recovery could take 10 years after coronavirus, university report warns

That is the verdict of a new paper from Ulster University on the timeline for recovery from the economic downturn associated with the pandemic.

The university’s economic policy centre (UUEPC) has already published two papers on the scale of the impact on the Northern Ireland economy.

The latest paper estimates that it will likely take four to five years to reach the economic activity levels before the pandemic, and “possibly more than 10 years” before unemployment falls to previous lows.

Gareth Hetherington, director of the UUEPC, said: “The hospitality, leisure and non-food retail sectors have been the most impacted because their businesses require staff and customers to be in close physical proximity to each other.

“These sectors have been slow to see restrictions lifted and are also most susceptible to any future lockdowns.

“Given the number of jobs in these sectors, the key challenge for government is to minimise the number of job losses. Furthermore, these sectors tend to employ a lower age demographic and people with lower levels of qualifications. Consequently, this group could find it more challenging to move into other higher skilled employment.”

The paper’s authors state that the sectors most impacted by the pandemic are retail, hospitality, and arts and entertainment – sectors which collectively employed 220,000 people in Northern Ireland, 24% of the total workforce, prior to lockdown.

One of the authors, Dr. Eoin Magennis, said: “We are likely to be looking at unprecedented numbers of people becoming unemployed with all the challenges this causes for personal lives and household incomes.

“The decisions taken over the length of time that the furlough scheme continues is likely to be a critical factor in numbers coming into Job Centres.”

He added: “The full resourcing of Job Centres and adopting methods to assess the future risk of long-term unemployment will be just as important to ensure that the labour market recovery is as fast as possible and that the level of scarring is minimised.”