Volume 68, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for the welfare state, its actors and benefit recipients

The COVID-19 crisis tested welfare states’ resilience in protecting citizens against sudden health-related and economic shocks. However, the crisis’ effects and responses to it vary substantially across countries. Using administrative registers of the Social Insurance Institution of Finland, we evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on various socio-economic groups by examining the receipt of social benefits and length of benefit spells. Furthermore, we analyse the duration of unemployment and social assistance spells that started during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the probabilities of receiving social assistance among different socio-economic groups during the crisis. The results of our analysis show that in 2020, the receipt of unemployment and social assistance benefits was highest among young people and particularly among women. However, extending the analysis to 2021 we found that unemployment spells were shorter among young people than among older age groups. Thus, while the youngest age groups were hardest hit by the crisis in terms of the increase in the number of recipients, they seem to have recovered from it faster than the older age groups. Our findings indicate that the Finnish social security system succeeded fairly well in mitigating the negative impacts of the crisis for vulnerable groups and those who faced job loss since small adjustments to the benefits maintained the income of these groups.

The article examines how the German welfare state has been responding to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the basis of various fields of social services, it asks how non-governmental social service providers adapted their services to the situation to keep them accessible for citizens. Moreover, it analyses under which conditions they were able to access and use the support instruments provided by different levels of government during the pandemic. The article applies a theoretical framework from implementation and evaluation research. Using empirical findings from three forms of social services (individual counselling, services in the form of group measures and assisted living) it examines comparatively which factors filter service providers’ access to welfare state support instruments in the pandemic.

We investigate the general effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on subjective well-being and determine whether this effect differs between recipients of basic income support (BIS) and the rest of the working-age population in Germany. BIS recipients constitute one of the most disadvantaged groups in Germany and might lack resources for coping with the crisis. Thus, our analysis contributes to investigations of whether the pandemic exacerbates or equalises preexisting social inequality. Our analysis employs data from the panel survey “Labour Market and Social Security” (PASS). These data have the key advantage that the collection in 2020 started prior to implementation of the first COVID-19-related policies. This situation enables us to apply a difference-in-differences approach to investigate the causal change in subjective well-being. Our results suggest that well-being declined during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, we find no difference in this decline between BIS recipients and other German residents. Thus, our results suggest that the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic neither exacerbated nor equalised pre-existing inequalities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had severe social and economic consequences. Governments have implemented or expanded a number of policy measures to cope with these consequences. In the paper, we ask whether there is more support for general social policy measures to compensate for the new uncertainties arising from the pandemic. Using survey data collected in two panel waves in March and June/July 2020, we analyse how public welfare attitudes have changed during the first phase of the pandemic in Germany. In addition to the individual-level survey data, we use time-varying regional data on infection and unemployment rates. We provide descriptive results and employ fixed-effects regressions. Our results show small changes in welfare attitudes, but we do not find evidence for increased public support for general social policy measures.