This paper assesses the impact on household incomes of the COVID-19 pandemic and governments' policy responses in April 2020 in four large and severely hit European countries: Belgium, Italy, Spain and the UK. We provide comparative evidence on the level of relative and absolute welfare...

This paper analyses the extent to which the Italian welfare system provides a monetary compensation for those who lost their earnings due to the lockdown imposed by the government in order to contain the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. In order to assess the potential impact of the first-order...