Resilience / vulnerability of Spanish households in the face of COVID-19. Disparities in the distribution and composition of savings in Europe.
The unprecedented global health and economic emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic highlights, now more than ever, the importance of promoting savings and financial planning in every household. Knowing households’ degree of financial resilience (or conversely, their degree of vulnerability) prio...
| Autores: | , |
|---|---|
| Formato: | informe técnico |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2021 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | IE |
| Repositorio: | Repositorio IE |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:repositorio.ie.edu:20.500.14417/2847 |
| Acesso em linha: | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5144909 https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14417/2847 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | Ahorro financiero Emergencia sanitaria Emergencia financiera Planificación financiera Financial savings Health emergency Finance emergency Finance planning |
| Resumo: | The unprecedented global health and economic emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic highlights, now more than ever, the importance of promoting savings and financial planning in every household. Knowing households’ degree of financial resilience (or conversely, their degree of vulnerability) prior to the pandemic is essential in order to be able to anticipate the consequences of the pandemic and better gear economic and social measures. As a result of this situation, the academic community has raised its voice, advocating the urgent need to promote structural policies that foster conscious financial planning in households as a mechanism of resilience to future crises; see Arellano and Cámara (2020). Despite the packages of social and economic measures put in place by the governments of different countries, including Spain, and by the European Union, a great deal of households has experienced, and will continue to experience in the coming months, a deep income reduction. In Spain, the number of workers affected by temporary lay-offs amounted to nearly 3.4 million. In some sectors, more than 80% of social security affiliates has been in this situation. In turn, more than 1 million self-employed workers have been eligible to receive the aid for the cessation of activities. Considering that the employed population in Spain is around 18.5 million people, at least a quarter of the population has suffered a significant income reduction due to the health emergency. In these situations, it is clear that accumulating savings over time (referred to in the literature as ‘wealth’) is an excellent mechanism of precaution and financial stability that citizens can apply to compensate for temporary income reductions. Analysing the state of this accumulation of savings or the level, of wealth that households had prior to the crisis caused by the pandemic, can be used to assess a family’s degree of resilience (and therefore, their degree of vulnerability). Literature does so by estimating the time that households would be able to subsist on their savings in the hypothetical scenario of a total lack of income, a scenario that is unfortunately not so hypothetical, but rather real, for many families in the current circumstances. |
|---|