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Sociodemographic inequality in exposure to COVID-19-induced economic hardship in the United Kingdom

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a lockdown in European countries in the first half of 2020, including stay-at-home orders and closure of non-essential businesses. To mitigate the detrimental effects on the financial stress of employees and households, the UK government implemented a furlough scheme tha...

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Autor principal: Witteveen, Dirk
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Elsevier Ltd. 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7474909/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32921869
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2020.100551
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author Witteveen, Dirk
author_facet Witteveen, Dirk
author_sort Witteveen, Dirk
collection PubMed
description The COVID-19 pandemic led to a lockdown in European countries in the first half of 2020, including stay-at-home orders and closure of non-essential businesses. To mitigate the detrimental effects on the financial stress of employees and households, the UK government implemented a furlough scheme that temporarily secured earnings up to 80 percent of regular pay. Other employees were at risk of reduced work hours or permanent job loss. Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study COVID-19 Supplement, this study examines the extent to which different earnings groups and sociodemographic groups (gender, race/ethnicity, class background) became exposed to economic hardship between March and May of 2020. Results indicate that lower earnings groups were more than twice as likely to experience economic hardship relative to top quintile earners. Furthermore, among pre-COVID employed individuals, men had a higher probability of being furloughed or dismissed from work, as well as whites in middle-income jobs. Analyses indicate that these gaps are to a large extent attributable to structural gender earnings inequalities within occupations and the fact that women and racial-ethnic minorities are employed in essential occupations.
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spelling pubmed-74749092020-09-08 Sociodemographic inequality in exposure to COVID-19-induced economic hardship in the United Kingdom Witteveen, Dirk Res Soc Stratif Mobil Article The COVID-19 pandemic led to a lockdown in European countries in the first half of 2020, including stay-at-home orders and closure of non-essential businesses. To mitigate the detrimental effects on the financial stress of employees and households, the UK government implemented a furlough scheme that temporarily secured earnings up to 80 percent of regular pay. Other employees were at risk of reduced work hours or permanent job loss. Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study COVID-19 Supplement, this study examines the extent to which different earnings groups and sociodemographic groups (gender, race/ethnicity, class background) became exposed to economic hardship between March and May of 2020. Results indicate that lower earnings groups were more than twice as likely to experience economic hardship relative to top quintile earners. Furthermore, among pre-COVID employed individuals, men had a higher probability of being furloughed or dismissed from work, as well as whites in middle-income jobs. Analyses indicate that these gaps are to a large extent attributable to structural gender earnings inequalities within occupations and the fact that women and racial-ethnic minorities are employed in essential occupations. Elsevier Ltd. 2020-10 2020-09-06 /pmc/articles/PMC7474909/ /pubmed/32921869 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2020.100551 Text en © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Article
Witteveen, Dirk
Sociodemographic inequality in exposure to COVID-19-induced economic hardship in the United Kingdom
title Sociodemographic inequality in exposure to COVID-19-induced economic hardship in the United Kingdom
title_full Sociodemographic inequality in exposure to COVID-19-induced economic hardship in the United Kingdom
title_fullStr Sociodemographic inequality in exposure to COVID-19-induced economic hardship in the United Kingdom
title_full_unstemmed Sociodemographic inequality in exposure to COVID-19-induced economic hardship in the United Kingdom
title_short Sociodemographic inequality in exposure to COVID-19-induced economic hardship in the United Kingdom
title_sort sociodemographic inequality in exposure to covid-19-induced economic hardship in the united kingdom
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7474909/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32921869
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2020.100551
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