COVID‐19 and Inequalities*

TLDR

The paper reviews evidence on how the COVID‑19 crisis has affected inequalities in employment, earnings, family life, and health. It examines how these new fissures interact with existing inequalities across socioeconomic status, education, age, gender, ethnicity, and geography. The study finds that pre‑existing inequalities and policy challenges are key to understanding the pandemic’s complex impacts, that the crisis can directly exacerbate some of these inequalities, and that its legacy may influence inequalities long term, though not all effects are dis‑equilibrating.

Abstract

Abstract 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.