sustainability Article Socioeconomic Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring Uncertainty in the Forecast of the Romanian Unemployment Rate for the Period 2020–2023 Adriana AnaMaria Davidescu 1,2, * , Simona-Andreea Apostu 2,3 and Liviu Adrian Stoica 4   Citation: Davidescu, A.A.; Apostu, S.-A.; Stoica, L.A. Socioeconomic Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring Uncertainty in the Forecast of the Romanian Unemployment Rate for the Period 2020–2023. Sustainability 2021, 13, 7078. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su13137078 Academic Editors: Mbodja Mougoué and Afees A. Salisu Received: 21 May 2021 Accepted: 20 June 2021 Published: 23 June 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 Department of Education, Training and Labour Market, National Scientific Research Institute for Labour and Social Protection, 010643 Bucharest, Romania 2 Department of Statistics and Econometrics, Bucharest University of Economic Studies, 010552 Bucharest, Romania; simona.apostu@csie.ase.ro 3 Institute of National Economy, 050711 Bucharest, Romania 4 Finance Postdoctoral School of Bucharest University of Economic Studies, 010352 Bucharest, Romania; liviu.stoica@csie.ase.ro * Correspondence: adriana.alexandru@csie.ase.ro Abstract: During the health crisis, it is vital to protect not only the critical sectors of the economy, the assets, technology, and infrastructure, but first and foremost, it is fundamental to protect jobs and workers. The current COVID-19 pandemic has had a strong impact on the labor market from three main perspectives: number of jobs (through unemployment and underemployment), quality of work (through wages, or access to social protection), and through the effects on specific groups, with a higher degree of vulnerability to unfavorable labor market outcomes. The measures aiming to reduce economic activity and social contacts lead to a reduction of labor demand and implicitly to the increase of the unemployment rate. In this context, it becomes even more relevant to be able to monitor the unemployment rate, providing relevant forecasts that include the effects of market shocks. Thus, our paper aims to forecast the unemployment rate for the period 2020–2023 using the Box-Jenkins methodology based on ARIMA models, exploring also the uncertainty based on fan charts. Although the baseline forecast offers valuable information, a good understanding of risks and uncertainties related to this forecast is equally important. The empirical results highlighted an ascending trend for unemployment rate during 2020, followed by a slow and continuous decrease until the end of 2023 with a high probability for the forecast to be above the central projection. Keywords: socioeconomic effects; pandemics; unemployment rate; ARIMA models; Box-Jenkins procedure; forecast; uncertainty; Romania 1. Introduction “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” [1]. In most conceptualizations of sustainable development, social sustainability is one of the three key pillars alongside environmental sustainability and economic sustainability. Generating more decent jobs that provide a living wage, social protection, and worker rights is the best way to promote the three components of sustainable development: eco- nomic growth, social cohesion, and environmental sustainability. However, in the last decades, the importance of the social sustainability concept highly increased, considered an independent sustainability rather than solely part of sustainable development. Various social issues and topics define social sustainability, in- cluding unemployment, education for sustainable development, separate waste collection, and sustainable retrofit [2]. Sustainability 2021, 13, 7078. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13137078 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability