While the number of vacancies soared enormously in the wake of the pandemic, the comovement of unemployment and vacancies (the movement in the Beveridge space) was similar to other strong upswings in the past.

But the recovery from the pandemic was much faster than from previous recessions. Typically, it would take around one and a half to two years after a slump for unemployment to fall as sharply and job vacancies to rise as much as in the first half of 2021. The strength of the 2021 rebound resulted from three factors: First, companies resumed their activities simultaneously and within a very short period, while supply usually increases gradually and production capacities need time to expand. Second, the lockdowns did not weaken households' purchasing power like in "conventional" downturns. Third, fiscal emergency measures were in fact pro-cyclical and added oomph after the re-opening of the economy.

Instead of building up gradually, unemployment rose abruptly during the pandemic and then fell again, in stark contrast to "conventional" downturns in the past.

A trivarite VAR featuring world commodity prices (in log-levels), world industrial production (in log-levels) and domestic consumer price inflation (y-o-y change of log-levels), 6 lags and a constant is estimated based on a Minnesota prior; the coefficients of consumer price inflation in the equations of world industrial production and commodity prices are shrunk towards zero. World demand and world supply shocks, whose effects on domestic consumer price inflation are shown here, are identified via sign restrictions.

From the outbreak of the pandemic in January 2020 to its temporary peak in May 2020, negative demand-side impulses continuously intensified. At the same time, however, there were also supply-side distortions (the disruption of global supply chains) counteracting the price dampening effect (in March 2020, OPEC's expansion of oil production brought temporary relief).

From June 2020, the recovery in industry added upwards pressure to inflation, but supply conditions were still benign. As of February 2021, they started to worsen again so that both adverse supply-side conditions and positive demand-side developments acted inflationary.

Kind of self-explaining; lockdown intensity is measured with the corresponding Blavatnik School of Government's index.

While the recession in the second quarter of 2020 depended largely on the severity of the lockdown (see previous drawing), the recovery in the third quarter had less to do with the degree to which lockdown measures were lifted than it did with the depth of the preceding slump.

An early but still relevant picture. It shows that the higher the level of private sector debt in the run-up to the global financial crisis, the larger the subsequent burden in terms of GDP losses.