Documents social impact 312 results

"Politicians love platitudes, especially when trying to persuade us to accept a policy, the burden of which is likely to be unevenly spread and unequally borne. Just as the rallying cry for austerity was ‘we are all in this together' – though nothing could be further from the truth in a decade during which the rich became infinitely richer while the poor plunged further into poverty – so now we are reminded in those dismal daily briefings that COVID-19 is the great leveller which does not discriminate, affecting prince and pauper alike. ..."

"Outbreaks affect men, women and other genders differentially. This can be both the direct infections with a pathogen, or the secondary effects of public health response policies. COVID-19 is no exception, and the gendered impacts thus far and in the future are numerous. This study outlines some of the key gendered effects thus far and suggestions for how these may extend into the post-crisis period based on currently available data on COVID and longer-term effects of previous outbreaks. This includes the lack of sex-disaggregated data, the role of healthcare workers and care workers, domestic violence, the impact of quarantine on feminised sectors of the economy, the additional unpaid labour on women as a result of lockdown, access to maternity, sexual and reproductive health services. This study commissioned by the European Parliament's Policy Department for Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the FEMM Committee."

"... Indeed, the contribution of precarious work and the informal sector to exacerbating the pandemic and rendering societies more vulnerable has largely escaped detailed scrutiny or policy debate globally. COVID-19 has highlighted a number of structural problems as well as the need to learn from the past. It affords an opportunity for an evidence-driven policy re-set with regard to the primacy of health infrastructure/goals, reintegrating work and public health, and policies to reshape work arrangements. The pandemic is also a warning signal as it is unlikely to be the last major global disaster/catastrophe experienced in coming decades. Climate change, environmental degradation, and habitat loss interacting with rising economic inequality and ongoing structural racism will see to that."

"This report focuses on the social and economic resilience that might be achieved by well-designed and well-targeted investment in education. It provides a review of the individual and social returns of education in terms of both economic and non-economic effects. The most important economic benefits for individuals include better skills, better employability, increased productivity and higher earnings. Among the non-economic benefits associated with education are better health, lower crime rates and higher levels of trust, tolerance, and civic and political engagement. At the societal level, the most relevant returns from education are associated with higher GDP growth, better diffusion and adoption of technologies, higher innovation capacity, stable public finances and better social cohesion. We show that European countries, which are endowed with better education, both in terms of quantity and quality, recover faster from economic shocks and have better economic resilience. We also provide evidence that individuals who are more educated are more flexible and adaptable to new technological advances, and we discuss the specific skills that are expected to be most in demand in the future. We point out that access to high-quality preschool education for disadvantaged children is one of the most important policies to tackle existing inequalities within a society. The report also discusses the implications of the Covid-19 related school lockdowns in early 2020 on individuals (students, teachers and parents), educational institutions and systems, and suggests that if not tackled adequately during the recovery stage, the immediate adverse consequences – such as interrupted learning and skills formation, exacerbated educational inequalities and rising dropout rates – could lead to high social and economic costs in the long term."