COVID-19 and inequalities

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

June 15, 2020

Summary:

This paper brings together evidence from various data sources and the most recent studies to describe what we know so far about the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on inequalities across several key domains of life, including employment and ability to earn, family life and health. We show how these new fissures interact with existing inequalities along various key dimensions, including socio-economic status, education, age, gender, ethnicity and geography. We find that the deep underlying inequalities and policy challenges that we already had are crucial in understanding the complex impacts of the pandemic itself and our response to it, and that the crisis does in itself have the potential to exacerbate some of these pre-existing inequalities fairly directly. Moreover, it seems likely that the current crisis will leave legacies that will impact inequalities in the long term. These possibilities are not all disequalising, but many are.

Published in

Fiscal Studies

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 41 , p.291 -319

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-5890.12232

ISSN

1435671

Subjects

Notes

Open Access

© 2020 The Authors. Fiscal Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. on behalf of Institute for Fiscal Studies.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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