This paper assesses the impact on household incomes of the COVID-19 pandemic and governments’ policy responses in April 2020 in four large and severely hit EU countries: Belgium, Italy, Spain and the UK. We provide comparative evidence on the level of relative and absolute welfare resilience at the onset of the pandemic, by creating counterfactual scenarios using the European tax-benefit model EUROMOD combined with COVID-19-related household surveys and timely labor market data. We find that income poverty increased in all countries due to the pandemic while inequality remained broadly the same. Differences in the impact of policies across countries arose from four main sources: the asymmetric dimension of the shock by country, the different protection offered by each tax-benefit system, the diverse design of discretionary measures and differences in the household level circumstances and living arrangements of individuals at risk of income loss in each country.

中文翻译：

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部分欧洲国家在 COVID-19 大流行爆发时的福利复原力：对公共财政和家庭收入的影响


本文评估了比利时、意大利、西班牙和英国这四个受灾严重的欧盟国家中，COVID-19 大流行对家庭收入的影响以及 2020 年 4 月政府的政策应对措施。我们通过使用欧洲税收优惠模型 EUROMOD 结合与 COVID-19 相关的家庭调查和及时的劳动力市场数据创建反事实情景，提供有关大流行爆发时相对和绝对福利弹性水平的比较证据。我们发现，由于疫情大流行，所有国家的收入贫困均有所增加，而不平等现象基本保持不变。各国政策影响的差异主要来自四个方面：各国冲击的不对称程度、每个税收福利制度提供的不同保护、酌情措施的多样化设计以及家庭水平和生活安排的差异。每个国家面临收入损失风险的个人。