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The article presents an international comparison of selected quality of employment indicators from the perspective of the employed person. The conceptual framework is based on the Handbook on Measuring Quality of Employment, A Statistical Framework, released by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE). From the 67 indicators presented by the framework, 21 were selected for the comparison between Finland, Germany, Israel, Italy and Switzerland, ensuring that all dimensions for measuring quality of employment were covered and analyzing sex and age differences for several indicators. The present article shows the main results for the indicators chosen and the limits of the international comparability, mainly related to different institutional and labour market contexts, and to the heterogeneity of data sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increased availability of online information in recent years has aroused interest in the possibility of deriving indications for many kinds of phenomena. In the more specific economic and statistical context, numerous studies suggest the use of online search data to improve the forecasting and nowcasting of official economic indicators with a view to increasing the promptness of their circulation. The purpose of this work is to investigate if the use of big data can improve the forecasting of the youth unemployment rate – estimated in Italy on a monthly basis by the Italian National Institute of Statistics – by means of time series models. The time series used are those of the Google Trends query share for the keyword offerte di lavoro (job offers) and the official labour force survey data for the Italian youth unemployment rate since 2004. Two different models are estimated: an ARIMA model using only the official youth unemployment rate series and a VAR model combining the former series with the Google Trends query share. The results show that the use of Google Trends information leads to an average decrease in the forecast error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]