The outbreak of the corona pandemic in spring 2020 was accompanied by a recessionary shock, which forced many companies react drastically. In April 2020, the German Federal Employment Agency received more than 600,000 notifications regarding short-time work, naming around 8 million people. When a recessionary shock occurs, individual regions react with different degrees of intensity on an ad hoc basis. While some regions have to cope with severe losses and therefore react sensitively to the shock, there may be others that are less affected by a recessionary shock and can therefore be classified as resistant.

For resistance as part of resilience, short-time work can be used as an orientation for the sensitivity of a region to a shock, since it is at least temporarily associated with a loss of production. Moreover, short-time work is limited in time and can only delay a wave of layoffs if the economic situation does not improve. In the following, the persons in application for short-time work between March and June 2020, which will be provided by the Federal Employment Agency, will therefore be used as an indicator of regional resilience. In order to reflect the significance in the respective labor market regions, the applications are compared to the nowcast of the number of employees from the QMORE model for the year 2020. For the federal and state governments, these figures can be viewed by sector and occupation at www.qube-datenportal.de. For the purposes of this evaluation, the 34 labor market regions, for which labor market developments are projected in the BMAS forecast, are examined below.