Public Policy in a Time of Crisis: A Framework for Evaluating Canada’s COVID-19 Income Support Programs
Kourtney Koebel,
Dionne Pohler,
Rafael Gomez and
Akshay Mohan
Canadian Public Policy, 2021, vol. 47, issue 2, 316-333
Abstract:
Income support programs introduced for workers during the first wave of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdowns faced criticism for their negative labour supply effects. We propose that these concerns about work disincentives are embedded in restrictive assumptions about work and led to suboptimal design of crisis support policies. We describe a framework for analyzing alternative crisis income support programs predicated on more realistic assumptions of labour markets and human motivation. Our framework proposes that balancing efficiency, equity, and voice objectives should be the goal of crisis labour market policies. We argue that adoption of a basic income targeted toward low-income workers, in combination with Canada’s pre-existing Employment Insurance program, would have balanced efficiency, equity, and voice better than the combination of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit and Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy. A targeted basic income would also have been more effective at achieving stated public health objectives.
Keywords: basic income; COVID-19; efficiency; equity; labour market; voice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)
Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/cpp.2020-117 (text/html)
access restricted to subscribers
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpp:issued:v:47:y:2021:i:2:p:316-333
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.utpjournals.com/loi/cpp/
Access Statistics for this article
Canadian Public Policy is currently edited by Prof. Mike Veall
More articles in Canadian Public Policy from University of Toronto Press University of Toronto Press Journals Division 5201 Dufferin Street Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3H 5T8.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Iver Chong ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).