European Union: COVID-19 impact on employment income

The current COVID-19 pandemic crisis and the economic shutdown due to sanitary measures have led to an unprecedented rise in the number of workers absent from work and an increased number of jobs lost.

This article presents the first results of a nowcasting exercise focused on the estimation of employment income losses along the distribution.

All figures provided are part of the experimental statistics produced by Eurostat in the frame of advanced estimates on income inequality and poverty indicators.

The estimated loss for median employment income at EU level is -5.2% in 2020 compared with 2019.

High unequally

The impact of the crisis is very unequally spread between Member States.

In this sense, it´s particularly strong for the most vulnerable sub-groups of the working population, with low wage earners having losses 3 to 6 times larger than high wage earners in half of the EU Member States.

National governments have put in place or activated short-term work schemes to address the COVID-19 economic challenges, in particular, policies to preserve jobs (wage compensation schemes).

These contributed to mitigate the income loss in all EU countries with the overall income loss reduced by half.