Figure - available via license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
This paper estimates the potential distributional consequences of the first phase of the COVID-19 lockdowns on poverty and labour income inequality in 20 Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries. We estimate the share of individuals that are potentially able to remain active under the lockdown by taking into account individuals’ teleworking cap...
Context in source publication
Similar publications
To identify the impact, we compare labor market stocks and labor market flows over four quarters for a set of balanced panel samples of comparable workers before and after the pandemic. We find that the pandemic has negatively affected the labor market status of both men and women, but that the effect is significantly stronger for women, magnifying...
Citations
... Trade liberalization has a complex and regionally variable effect on income inequality, notwithstanding its ability to spur development. For example, income inequality has improved in some parts of Latin America and the Caribbean since 1990 but has worsened in many wealthy and middle-income nations (Delaporte et al., 2021;Acheampong et al., 2022). ...
The portion of farm households' income outside the farm, such as non-farm salaries and wages, pensions, and interest income, is referred to as non-farm income. In Pakistan, non-farm profit is an essential source of income. "income inequality" describes the inequitable income distribution between people or families in a community or economy. Income inequality is a significant issue worldwide, including in Pakistan. This research estimated the effect of non-farm income on rural and urban areas and analyzed the relationship between non-farm income and income inequality within households.
... The restrictions put in place to prevent COVID-19 proliferation have led to a decline in industrial activity, triggering a cycle of business closures and widespread unemployment globally [1,2]. In Latin American nations, the pandemic has exacerbated income inequality and the prevalence of informal employment [3][4][5]. Notably, in this region, informal employment comprises nearly half of all job opportunities, underscoring the importance of recognizing that individuals without formal employment face heightened vulnerabilities, including diminished labor rights and social protections [6]. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), leading to setbacks in various Latin American countries. In Brazil, progress in technological development and the adoption of sustainable practices by organizations has been significantly hindered. Yet, there remains a limited understanding of the long-term impacts on the country’s development, and a structured national plan for recovery and resuming progress toward the SDGs is lacking. This paper aims to investigate the repercussions of COVID-19 on SDGs 9 (industry, innovation, and infrastructure) and 12 (sustainable consumption and production) in the context of a latecomer country such as Brazil. This study adopted the Delphi-based scenario and Fuzzy Delphi approach and involved the participation of 15 sustainability experts with extensive experience in the Brazilian industrial sector. The findings elucidate the long-term impacts of the pandemic on these SDGs, focusing on Brazil’s socioeconomic landscape and developmental challenges. The pandemic worsened pre-existing issues, hindering infrastructure modernization, technological investment, and sustainable practices. Insufficient research funding, industry modernization, and small business integration further impede progress. Additionally, the paper identifies implications for research, companies, and public policies, aiming to provide actionable insights for fostering sustainable development in the post-pandemic era.
... For these reasons, the public health response throughout the region had a heavy focus on NPIs throughout the pandemic (6). Globally, lockdowns have been reported to have wide ranging undesired consequences and negative social impacts including unemployment, loss of livelihoods, educational disruption, genderbased violence and mental health crises (7)(8)(9). Similar effects were felt across the Caribbean region with increases in unemployment averaging 27%, and with estimates of over 300,000 job losses across the Eastern Caribbean area due to the pandemic, along with an estimated 6-fold increase in severe poverty (9). ...
Introduction
Evidence exploring the relationship between COVID-19 mitigation measures and mental health has primarily been from quantitative studies in large, developed countries. A qualitative study to explore the knowledge, attitudes and behaviors of young people living in Trinidad and Tobago was conducted to engage and collaborate with youth on matters affecting them during the pandemic.
Methods
Ten virtual focus groups were conducted with 64 participants aged 18 to 24 in 2021 when partial lockdown measures were in effect for COVID-19 prevention. Groups were stratified by geographic location and socioeconomic status. The recordings were transcribed and analyzed to explore themes of importance to youth.
Results
Negative impacts on mental health emerged as a strong theme. Lack of timelines for restrictions led to wide ranging mental health impacts, conflict and tension existed in home environments, longer restrictions led to erosion of the social culture, and young people experienced stress about the changing face of education and job security due to the pandemic.
Discussion
Measures taken to address one serious public health concern, COVID-19, led to the aggravation of another serious public health concern, mental ill-health. Mental health initiatives to help young people navigate issues specific to their generation must be developed. In low resourced Small Island Developing States settings. The increased need for mental health services during and because of the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the need for strengthening the capacity and resilience of these to respond to environmental and health emergencies. Building the resilience of educational and employment services is also needed.
... Desde el comienzo de la pandemia, una literatura en rápido crecimiento se ha centrado en estimar la viabilidad de trabajar desde casa para personas de todo el (Delaporte et al., 2021). ...
... Conversely, when countries were weighted by population, international income inequality increased [36]. Delaporte et al. [37], on the other hand, examined the impact of major epidemics over the past two decades on income distribution. They suggested that the scale of COVID-19, compared to other pandemics, would lead to an increase in the Gini coefficient and raise the income share of higher-income deciles. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on almost all aspects of society and the world’s economy. This study aimed to examine the impact of COVID-19 on regional income inequality in China. Based on provincial data from 20 provinces (covering 218 prefecture-level cities) for the period from 2013 to 2022, the study revealed the significant impact of COVID-19 on widening regional income inequality, using a continuous difference-in-differences (DID) model. The results were robust when applying a parallel trend test, lagging control variables, and alternative measures of regional income inequality to test the results. Additional analysis suggested that the adverse impact of COVID-19 on regional income inequality was increased by regions’ foreign trade dependence and their share in the service industry but may have been weakened by the development of the digital economy. The findings highlight the adverse effects of COVID-19 on regional income inequality.
... En América Latina y el Caribe, la vulnerabilidad laboral está estrechamente relacionada con los elevados grados de desigualdad y la transmisión intergeneracional de la escasez de recursos, por ejemplo, educativos la cual incide en una baja movilidad laboral entre las generaciones (Celhay y Gallegos, 2022;Doruk, Pastore y Yavuz, 2020). La pandemia del COVID-19 ha subrayado esta situación de vulnerabilidad registrándose, entre otros, aumentos de la pobreza y la desigualdad, como también el incumplimiento forzado de normas de confinamiento como estrategia para asegurar la subsistencia familiar (CEPAL, 2022;Delaporte, Escobar y Peña, 2021). 7 ...
En este capítulo se revisan tendencias de alcance global que influyen actualmente en los mercados laborales latinoamericanos y caribeños y que posiblemente tendrán un impacto creciente en el futuro, sobre todo en las poblaciones en situación de vulnerabilidad. Estas tendencias son la globalización y su reversión parcial, la evolución demográfica, la revolución tecnológica en curso, y el cambio climático y los desafíos de una transición justa. El capítulo cierra con algunas reflexiones sobre políticas para enfrentar los desafíos que emergen en este contexto para la generación de empleo y el fomento de la inclusión laboral. (acceso: https://www.cepal.org/es/publicaciones/48947-desigualdades-inclusion-laboral-futuro-trabajo-america-latina)
... However, NPIs such as social distancing presented a major impact on poverty and inequality [13]. The epidemiological value of such interventions was less evident in lower-income countries, as they imposed a heavy burden on vulnerable groups [14,15]. Another important aspect of NPIs and COVID-19 itself is the toll on mental health that may have affected the perception of risk as well as the importance of individual and collective control measures [16][17][18][19]. ...
The epidemiology of COVID-19 presented major shifts during the pandemic period. Factors such as the most common symptoms and severity of infection, the circulation of different variants, the preparedness of health services, and control efforts based on pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions played important roles in the disease incidence. The constant evolution and changes require the continuous mapping and assessing of epidemiological features based on time-series forecasting. Nonetheless, it is necessary to identify the events, patterns, and actions that were potential factors that affected daily COVID-19 cases. In this work, we analyzed several databases, including information on social mobility, epidemiological reports, and mass population testing, to identify patterns of reported cases and events that may indicate changes in COVID-19 behavior in the city of Araraquara, Brazil. In our analysis, we used a mathematical approach with the fast Fourier transform (FFT) to map possible events and machine learning model approaches such as Seasonal Auto-regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and neural networks (NNs) for data interpretation and temporal prospecting. Our results showed a root-mean-square error (RMSE) of about 5 (more precisely, a 4.55 error over 71 cases for 20 March 2021 and a 5.57 error over 106 cases for 3 June 2021). These results demonstrated that FFT is a useful tool for supporting the development of the best prevention and control measures for COVID-19.
... Our paper is also related to another strand of the economic literature on the COVID-19 pandemic that looks at the issue of working from home and the ability to teleworking (Adams-Prassl et al. 2022, Dingel and Neiman 2020, Garrote-Sanchez et al. 2021, Gottlieb et al. 2021, Saltiel 2020, Berniell and Fernandez 2021, Delaporte et al. 2021. This line of research highlights the role of working from home in alleviating the impact of the shock and stresses the asymmetries in the ability to teleworking among socioeconomic groups. ...
... This line of research highlights the role of working from home in alleviating the impact of the shock and stresses the asymmetries in the ability to teleworking among socioeconomic groups. This paper also relates to the regional studies that examine the impact of the shock in Latin America (Busso et al. 2020, de la Flor et al. 2021, Delaporte et al. 2021, ECLAC 2020, Lustig et al. 2020. These studies find that Latin America was one of the regions hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and the containment measures, with staggering costs in terms of lives, jobs, incomes and welfare. ...
Asymmetry in childcare responsibilities is one of the main reasons behind gender gaps in the labor market. In that context, the ability to work from home may alleviate the hindrances of women with children to participate in the labor market. We study these issues in Latin America, a region with wide gender gaps, in the framework of a major shock that severely affected employment: the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we estimate models of job loss exploiting microdata from the World Bank’s High-Frequency Phone Surveys conducted immediately after the onset of the pandemic. We find that the mitigating effect of working from home on the severity of job losses was especially relevant for women with children. The results are consistent with a plausible mechanism: due to the traditional distribution of childcare responsibilities within the household, women with children were more likely to stay home during school closures, and therefore the ability to work from home was crucial for them to keep their jobs.
... Under four different scenarios, they estimate an increase in the Gini coefficient from 3.5 to 7.3%. Similarly, Delaporte and Pena (2021) aim to evaluate the distributional outcomes of social distancing due to the pandemic by considering poverty and labor income inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. They show that both poverty and labor income inequality have gone up, and most of the income losses can be attributed to the sectoral and occupational structure of the economies. ...
... Moreover, what the literature on COVID-19 has clarified is that the burden of the crisis is clearly different across economic sectors: it crucially depends upon the distinction between "essential" and "non-essential" sectors and upon the "teleworkability" of professions within sectors. Delaporte and Pena (2021) show that across the different economic sectors, workers in the construction sector, in manufacturing industries and in the wholesale and retail trade sectors have documented relevant labor income losses. They argue that in countries with higher shares of capacity to WFH workers are relatively more protected against labor income drops. ...
Using Italian Labour Force Survey data for the period 2019Q1-2020Q4 and apply- ing quantile regression model accounting for sample selection bias, the paper inves- tigates the effects of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic on the wage distribu- tion of employees, exploiting differences across sectors and by working from home arrangement. The findings reveal that the pandemic seems to positively affect wages of the entire workforce. However, this short-term advantage might be temporary as potentially driven by occupational changes in employment composition, whereas teleworking arrangement entails a wage premium for all workers. Low paid workers, employed in hotel/restaurant sector and not teleworking during the outbreak, face a reduction in wages (− 13.7%), while employees of public administration and educa- tion sectors exhibit a wage premium. When considering the joint effect of COVID- 19 and working from home arrangement, estimates show that, despite few excep- tions, wages of teleworking employees have been not affected by the coronavirus. Finally, we also control for self-selection issue by implementing the inverse prob- ability weighting estimator.
... For instance, the labour-rural-tertiary category forms 60.7% of total household factor ownership for the top quintile (Q5) rural non-farming households. This result resonates with findings from the distributional consequences of Covid-19 lockdown in Latin America and the Caribbean (Delaporte et al., 2021). In their study, they found that labour income distributions were affected differently in different countries, and informal workers were more likely to experience a lower drop of their pre-lockdown labour income under imperfect compliance. ...
This study examines the economy‐wide implications of infectious diseases, taking the case of the Covid‐19 pandemic in Uganda. Covid‐19 containment measures generated social and economic consequences. We employ a recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium model to evaluate the implications on the economy. We design scenarios to mimic the containment policies via labour supply, labour productivity, government healthcare spending and remittance inflows. Results indicate that growth in sector output declines when compared to the no‐Covid‐19 baseline. However, export growth rates are predicted to be higher. Increased government healthcare spending induces expansion in the healthcare output, but the sectors that produce the intermediate inputs for healthcare production do not grow in tandem. Household welfare declines, and the loss is largest among the top quintile households in both rural and urban areas. Policymakers should revisit Uganda's industrial policy towards domestic production of intermediate inputs to critical domestic sectors such as healthcare. Also, accelerate rural infrastructure development particularly the road network, to facilitate an integrated rural economy induced by the shift in labour and enterprise towards rural areas.
