Manoeuvring Through the Crisis: Labour Market and Social Policies During the COVID-19 Pandemic
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DOI: 10.1007/s10272-020-0937-6
Werner Eichhorst, Paul Marx and Ulf Rinne*
Manoeuvring Through the Crisis: Labour Market and Social Policies During the COVID-19 Pandemic The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has a severe impact on societies, economies and labour markets. However, not all countries, socio-economic groups and sectors are equally affected. Part of this disparity can be related to the different role and extent of short-time work, which is now being used more widely than during the Great Recession. Furthermore, unemployment benefits have been made more generous in many countries. While it is still too early to assess the relative success of national strategies to cope with the pandemic and to revitalise the labour market as well as to evaluate the medium-term fiscal viability of different support measures, a few policy directions become apparent. These include the use of digital tools to increase resilience against economic shocks, the longer-term perspective of shorttime workers in the current crisis, social protection for self-employed workers that is robust to economic crises and resilient models for school-to-work transitions of younger workers.
Economic and social disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic may have lasting effects on employment, income and working conditions. At the same time, there are significant cross-country differences in the labour market and social policy responses that are deployed to help mitigate the direct effects of the crisis. This article is based on the ongoing Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) Crisis Response Monitoring covering a sample of Europe© The Author(s) 2020. Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Open Access funding provided by ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics. *
The authors wish to thank Patrick Arni, René Böheim, Thomas Leoni, Pierre Cahuc, Tommaso Colussi, Rui Costa, Stephen Machin, Priscila Ferreira, João Cerejeira, Miguel Portela, Lena Hensvik, Oskar Nordström Skans, Susan Houseman, Egbert Jongen, Paul Verstraten, Martin Kahanec, Monika Martišková and Raul Ramos for their invaluable effort and contributions to the IZA Crisis Response Monitoring in these strange and challenging times.
Werner Eichhorst, IZA - Institute of Labor Economics, Bonn, Germany. Paul Marx, University of Duisburg-Essen; and IZA Institute of Labor Economics, Bonn, Germany. Ulf Rinne, IZA - Institute of Labor Economics, Bonn, Germany.
ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics
an countries and the US.1 It summarises major changes in labour markets and provides an assessment of crisisrelated interventions. It also points to policy issues that are likely to emerge in the near future. Unequal labour market impacts of COVID-19 Early forecasts about the economic impact of COVID-19 were clearly too optimistic. Over the past months, there has been a progressive deterioration of forecasts and of the actual economic situation. The late
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