Seminários GEE

The Covid-19 pandemic tipped the world into a global economic crisis for the second time in little more than a decade . Building on key insights about the nature and depth of the Great Recession (see Gough 2011; Verick and Islam; 2010) and the response that policy-makers put in place to curtail its impact on social welfare (see Starke et al, 2013), this paper aims to examine the nature of the early social policy response to the COVID19 pandemic in OECD nations. The paper is structured as follows. First, and taking as reference developments at the start of Financial Crisis, the paper discusses the nature of the current crisis in terms of its scale, spread, speed and the (a)symmetric nature of its impact. The second part of the paper discusses differences and continuies in the response to the current crisis, as compared with the measures taken to deal with the impact of the 2008 Financial Crisis.