Unfortunately, it is not possible to directly compare our projected outcomes for PFPS workers with observations in the GHFPS, as this group is not distinguishable from other private sector wage workers in that survey.<sup>45</sup> One can find little indication from the GHFPS that, by December 2020, there was a recovery in private sector jobs overall. However, by the third quarter of 2021, Georgia’s labor force participation rate (52.8 percent) surpassed its level in Q3 of 2012 (51.8 percent) and unemployment fell from its pandemic era peak in Q2 2021 (22.1) to 19.5 percent.<sup>46</sup> As in Jordan, Georgia’s labor market impacts varied greatly by the type and sector of job. Relatively few public sector workers faced jobs losses (an estimated 3.9 percent). Moreover, private sector waged workers fared slightly better than the self-employed: 24.1 percent of them lost their jobs due to COVID and were no longer working, versus 27.2 percent of the previously self-employed (Table 5-7).<sup>47</sup> Only and 1.8 percent stopped working due to the risk of exposure to the virus. If the GHFPS is taken as reliable, these data may indicate either that the rebound in jobs for core productive sectors captured in the WBES drew in different workers than those originally losing their jobs (with a net effect similar to our projected level) or that job losses were much more persistent for informal and temporary work.

Based on aggregate rates of job loss due to COVID-19, our comparisons for Jordan broadly _Table 5-7 Georgia: Percentage of Jobs Lost due to COVID-19, by Employer Type, December 2020_

|**By employment category**|**Due to**|**To avoid**|**Other**|
|---|---|---|---|
||**business or**<br>**job losses**<br>**from COVID**|**exposure to**<br>**the virus**|**reasons**<br>**(Including**<br>**non-COVID-**<br>**related)**|
|Public sector employees|3.9|0.6|12.4|
|All private sector employees<br>All private sector employees,|24.1|1.8|17.0|
|core sectors|29.0|-|-|
|Self-employed|27.2|3.1|29.8|
|Employers|33.9|0.0|4.0|

Source: the COVID-19 Georgia High-Frequency Phone Survey (GHFPS).

Notes: “Individuals who lost jobs because of job or business losses due to COVID-19”: Those who had a job in March 2020 but don’t have a job in December 2020 and answered that they stopped working because they lost jobs or no business because of COVID 19. Other reasons include contract end, validate the method we propose for quantifying the level of risk of job loss for PFPS jobs. An additional test of our methodology and its limits would be to see whether it can predict the realized distribution of net job losses across different categories of workers that would have most likely held the jobs that were lost.

# 5.4 Projected Job Losses by Sector

In this sub-section we assess how well projections of job loss align across various methods and sources of data by sector of employment. Because neither survey (WBES and LFS) on which our job loss projections are based are representative at the sector level, we might not expect projections to be fully reliable at the sector level. However, since we must use sectors to link employers to labor force data, it is important to assess this

> 45 The HFPS does not contain variables permitting one to distinguish formal from informal jobs.

> 46 - Georgia LFS. https://www.geostat.ge/en/modules/categories/683/Employment <u>Unemployment</u> 47 The figures include all industrial sectors.

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