Covid-19 threatens Europe’s success at fighting inequality

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Covid-19 threatens Europe’s success at fighting inequality
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The inequality gap between poor Sicily and wealthy Milan is more important than the one between Milan and Paris

in the southern Netherlands is a week-long spectacle of Rabelaisian debauchery. On February 28th Leon Elsjan of Wipper, a freelance sound technician, was running the sound system at the carnival-ending dance party in the town of Uden, watching costumed revellers consume vast amounts of beer. It would be his last gig for some time. This year’s carnivals were super-spreader events that introduced covid-19 to the Netherlands.

For decades, Europe’s vaunted welfare states have kept inequality relatively low. The covid-19 recession threatens that success in three ways. First, it hits badly paid workers harder than well-paid ones. Second, lockdowns create new forms of inequality. Some sectors stay open while others shut down, and some people can work from home while others cannot. Third, the severity of the downturn has revealed holes in Europe’s welfare systems.

Before taxes and transfers, the picture is different: on this basis Germany’s Gini, for example, is roughly the same as America’s. Europe’s tax systems are not particularly progressive, so economists have long put its success in fighting inequality down to large transfer programmes. But scholars at the World Inequality Lab , an academic project, argue that this is a mistake.

Covid-19 has made such gaps painfully visible. Spain’s government realised it had no mechanism to support the incomes of the large percentage of the population that works informally. That prodded the country’s Socialist-led government to introduce a guaranteed minimum income law, which was issued as a decree last week . In Italy, workers in the country’s huge informal sector may have trouble accessing its emergency covid-19 benefits.

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