UNDP (03.11.2020) Severe long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic could push an additional 207 million people into extreme poverty on top of the current pandemic trajectory, bringing the total to over 1 billion by 2030, according to findings released today by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

OpenGov Asia (01.12.2020) The pandemic has fundamentally changed lifestyles and thought processes across the world. There is a paradigm shift in the way people now interact with each other. With social distancing becoming the new norm, citizens are increasingly becoming dependent on technology to communicate and interact among themselves. In order to help public sector utilise digital applications and APIs to enhance service delivery and get digital transformation right, OpenGov Asia hosted an OpenGovLive!

blogs.worldbank.org (28.10.2020) Covariate shocks including disasters, economic crises, and pandemics threaten to reverse decades of gains achieved in poverty reduction and shared prosperity in the region. These shocks tend to disproportionately affect the poor and push near poor households into poverty.

Euronews (24.11.2020) How do you get by without a bank account? This is a question asked daily by millions of refugees worldwide who simply don’t have access to standard financial services. Even the digital and online services that many of us take for granted - tools that help us to save, transfer and receive money - are often out of reach for displaced people.

(25.10.2020) Le Conseil des ministres a validé vendredi la prolongation du droit passerelle jusqu’au 31 décembre et le doublement des montants du droit passerelle de crise.  Concrètement, le droit passerelle permet d’offrir une garantie de revenu minimum aux indépendants qui, après avoir temporairement interrompu partiellement ou totalement leur activité, ont pu la reprendre mais subissent une perte de chiffre d’affaires. L’accès à ce droit passerelle de soutien à la reprise aurait dû s’arrêter à la fin de ce mois d’octobre.

worldbank.org (nov 2020) The unprecedented and ongoing scale-up of social protection responses to the COVID-19 pandemic dwarf the response to the Great Recession. But how are countries financing such scale-up efforts? This note lays out ten stylized findings from a rapid review of social protection financing sources in thirty-one countries, including in terms of composition between external and domestic resources, and specific modalities within each.

NBER (October 2020) This working paper examine trends in employment, earnings, and incomes over the last two decades in the United States, and how the safety net has responded to changing fortunes, including the shutdown of the economy in response to the Covid-19 Pandemic. The U.S. safety net is a patchwork of different programs providing in-kind as well as cash benefits and had many holes prior to the Pandemic. In addition, few of the programs are designed explicitly as automatic stabilizers.

The EU is making additional financial resources available to the member states to strengthen cohesion and boost the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

European Commission (09.11.2020) The report analyses the progress towards the Europe 2020 target on reducing poverty and social exclusion, together with the latest social trends to watch, and presents the key structural social challenges in each Member State. However, following the COVID-19 pandemic that has swept across Europe in 2020, the report also focuses on the decisive action taken by Member States to protect employment, income and access to services through a variety of measures.

yahoo.com (04.11.2020) The policy will go into effect in 2024 and will give workers 12 weeks of paid leave that will be funded through a payroll tax. An additional 4 weeks of leave would be available to parents who experience pregnancy or childbirth complications. An estimated 2.6 million Colorado workers will have access to leave, according to the campaign’s website. Self-employed workers will be eligible, too. Workers will get up to 90% of their pay during their leave, up to the maximum weekly benefit of $1,100 that will be adjusted based on the state average weekly wage.