According to the latest MIC surveys, in September the social distress index fell to 19.5 (-1.4 points on August). The prices of goods and services with high purchasing frequency remained negative (-0.1% on an annual basis).

The MIC – Misery Index Confcommercio of September 2020 stood at an estimated value of 19.5, downsizing by 1.4 points on August. The gradual return to a less emergency situation, a trend that has characterized the summer months contributing to the partial downsizing of the area of social hardship, is likely to stop already in October.

The emergence of the second pandemic wave, with the consequent restrictive measures, is part of a context characterized by the failure to recover the income and employment losses generated by the lockdown of March and April,especially in the services sector, in particular those of tourism and, in general, related to the use of free time. The triggering of new interruptions of activity on a particularly fragile fabric could give rise to even more negative situations than those determined in the spring – MIC around 30 points – with the danger, increasingly concrete for many activities and jobs, of not surviving.

In September, the official unemployment rate stood at 9.6%,down a tenth of a point on August. The figure reflects a substantial stability in employment levels associated with a modest decrease in the number of jobseekers (-22 thousand units in economic terms). The moderate “summer” improvements did not allow the recovery of employment levels at the beginning of the year; the situation remains difficult for both self-employment and fixed-term work, in which there are many of the “seasonal” workers.

Including a proportion of the underemployed among the unemployed, without prejudice to all the people on the labour market, the unemployment rate is 1.2 points higher (10.8%). As far as the discouraged are concerned, there has been substantial stability in economic terms in the last month.

In September 2020, the authorized hours of the IGC were over 150 million to which are added another 104 million hours for checks disbursed by solidarity funds. Of the total, 94% had causal Covid-19, confirming the situation already detected in the previous months. In terms of hours of CIG actually used seasonally adjusted and traced back to ULA, it is estimated that this corresponds to almost 600 thousand standard work units. The combination of these dynamics has brought the extended unemployment rate to 15.5%.

In September, the prices of goods and services with high purchasing frequency fell by 0.1% year-on-year,while the cyclical change in negative territory remained for the third consecutive month.