THE UNEQUAL INEQUALITY IMPACT OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

While offi cial income inequality data for 2020 will not be available for about two years, the already available employment data for 2020 shows that the diff erence between highly-educated and low-educated people in terms of job losses is correlated with the economic shock from the COVID-19 pandemic, suggesting that the depth of the economic recession is related to the increase in within-country i. [...] 2 Our approach Because of the problems of the earlier attempts to estimate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on within-country and global income inequality, I adopted a different approach: I set up scenarios for the change in within-country income inequality in 2020 based on GDP change in the same year and then used the methodology from Darvas (2019) to establish scenarios for global and regiona. [...] The more negative the GDP shock, the larger the difference between the change in the employment of high-educated workers relative to low- educated workers. [...] For example, while the GDP shock was similar in the United States, Bulgaria and Czechia, the low-educated suffered much more than the high-educated in Bulgaria and the US than in Czechia. [...] The falling behind of the Italian and Spanish populations in the European income distribution is visible in the increased shares of these populations belonging to the bottom 40 percent of the European income distribution, while Germans increased their share in the top 40 percent (Figure 8).