To what extent has Covid-19 widened inequalities? How has it altered living conditions in Europe? Are the effects comparable from one country to another? Three years after the start of the pandemic, it is still difficult to firmly answer these questions, “both because the data is still lacking and because their analysis is delicate”warns Louis Maurin, director of the Observatory of Inequalities.
A handful of studies and figures published over the past few months are nevertheless beginning to shed some light. Following the example of those unveiled Friday January 13 by Eurostat: the Gini coefficient, measuring – very imperfectly – the level of income inequality (100 represents the most extreme inequality threshold) has hardly changed between 2019 and 2021: despite the recession caused by the Covid-19, it remained around 30 on average in the European Union (EU). With major nuances depending on the country: it thus increased a little in Greece (from 31 to 32.4 between 2019 and 2021) or in Portugal (from 31.9 to 33), but fell in Ireland (from 28.3 to 26.9).
These figures echo those published in October 2022 by INSEE. The health crisis has complicated the measurement of the evolution of poverty, warns the institute, with great caution. Nevertheless, everything suggests that this, like income inequality, remained more or less stable in 2020 in France, around 14.3% of the population.
While in 2020 employment rates fell significantly for both genders, the health crisis has compounded pre-existing disadvantages for women
If the analysis of the effects of the pandemic is particularly complex, it is because the shock caused by it and by the travel restrictions, brutal and relatively short, was of a very different nature from previous crises. “The 2008 recession hit construction and industrial production first, where the jobs are very male, while the 2020 recession mainly affected services, which were more feminized”recalls Blandine Mollard, of the European Institute for Equality between Men and Women.
Result: if in 2020 employment rates fell significantly for both sexes, the pandemic has aggravated pre-existing disadvantages for women, show the work of the institute. They were thus more affected by the reduction in working hours and fell more frequently into inactivity: 6% of women in employment before the crisis became inactive during the pandemic, compared to 4% of men. In addition, there are large variations depending on the country: 13% of Spanish women left employment in 2020, a record in the EU, compared to only 5% of Maltese women.
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