Who will Bear the Brunt of Lockdown Policies? Evidence from Tele-workability Measures Across Countries

Mariya Brussevich, Era Dabla-Norris and Salma Khalid

No 2020/088, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: Lockdowns imposed around the world to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic are having a differential impact on economic activity and jobs. This paper presents a new index of the feasibility to work from home to investigate what types of jobs are most at risk. We estimate that over 97.3 million workers, equivalent to about 15 percent of the workforce, are at high risk of layoffs and furlough across the 35 advanced and emerging countries in our sample. Workers least likely to work remotely tend to be young, without a college education, working for non-standard contracts, employed in smaller firms, and those at the bottom of the earnings distribution, suggesting that the pandemic could exacerbate inequality. Crosscountry heterogeneity in the ability to work remotely reflects differential access to and use of technology, sectoral mix, and labor market selection. Policies should account for demographic and distributional considerations both during the crisis and in its aftermath.

Keywords: WP; worker; worker characteristic; occupation; trade worker; job content; workers in SME; foreign-born worker; workers in the bottom decile; Wages; Employment; Unemployment; Labor markets; Global; COVID-19; inequality; working remotely (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24
Date: 2020-06-12
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

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