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The wealthy were not only able to keep their well-paid jobs but also benefited from soaring stock markets and rising house prices. The pandemic increased both economic and health inequalities due to a range of intersecting factors, which compounded each other. The result has been a rapid increase in inequality in the southern countries and growing divides within Europe. Workers in Italy, Spain and eastern European countries such as Poland and Hungary have not seen anything like the levels of support enjoyed by their northern neighbours. Lower levels of inequality in northern European countries and in East Asia since the 1970s are due to both higher levels of welfare payments for those in need, and higher public investment in education, health and housing, which are financed by higher levels of taxes on the wealthy.īoth require considerable budgetary resources, and since the financial crisis of 2008, with rising unemployment and a deterioration of already weak public finances, southern European countries have been less able to afford the largesse that in Germany accounts for over 20% of government spending.
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It is in these countries that the neoliberal crusade – which sought to reduce the size of government through reducing taxes and redistribution, privatise state enterprises and utilities, undermine the power of trade unions, and roll back rules that limited the free rein of the private sector – has advanced the furthest. Now, among high-income countries, the US is by far the most unequal, followed by the UK. Our World in Data, CC BY The public spending gap It is human actions and leaders that shape societies, not simply events. The contrast with the progress that followed the second world war reveals that we cannot tell in advance what these cataclysmic crises will bring. By the 1930s, with the onset of the Great Depression, there was widespread unemployment and destitution in the US, UK and Europe. Far from it leading to better conditions, inequality in many countries peaked in the early 1920s. The first world war was certainly no great leveller. To assume this pandemic will inevitably lead to reductions in inequality and usher in a better world would be irresponsible. Meanwhile, unlike the Great Depression and previous periods of crisis, during COVID-19 stock markets and the assets of the wealthy soared in value, widening the gap between rich and poor. The consequence of this pandemic is rising unemployment, not a shortage of available labour, as was the case with these earlier crises.
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The pandemic of 2020 does not compare to the Black Death, which killed a third of Europe’s population, or the 1918 flu, which killed around a third of the world’s population. But while mass death can drive up workers’ wages through a reduction in the workforce, pandemics are neither a necessary nor sufficient basis for reducing inequality.įar from being a “great equaliser”, COVID-19 has revealed and compounded existing inequalities in wealth, race, gender, age, education and geographical location.
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Economist Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century similarly points out that the world wars and the flu pandemic in 19 contributed to the decline in inequality after 1945. Historian Walter Scheidel argues in The Great Leveler that pandemics are among the four great horsemen that, through history, have led to greater equality – the others being war, revolution and state failure.