Le nuove povertà e vulnerabilità ai tempi del COVID-19: gli effetti della pandemia sul benessere degli Italiani

The impact of COVID-19 is multi-faceted and its analysis requires multiple datasets covering different angles of individuals’ life and appropriate empirical research and data science techniques spanning from economics to statistics, demography and computer science. The COVID-19 pandemic is much more than a health crisis, as it has a fundamental impact on the societies and economies. Moreover, the pandemic has a varying impact on different population groups (related to age, gender, economic status, health condition), and it will also likely increase poverty and inequalities. The main aim of the project is to understand and analyse the consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak on economy, society and individuals (including vulnerable groups), by estimating the multidimensional effects of the current health emergency related to the COVID-19 pandemic on the levels of poverty and vulnerability of the Italian population. This goal is particularly relevant, since the actual scientific debate is mainly focused on the macroeconomic effects of the pandemic, neglecting the distributive effects (inequalities, poverty, vulnerability of the households). Lack of up-to-date information on household income and living conditions, usually available a few years after the economic shock, constrains the possibilities for empirical analysis. To address this limitation, we assess the impact of the economic shock due to COVID-19 crisis on household income and living conditions by means of innovative empirical techniques. The methodology consists of five main phases: (i) Analysis of the COVID-19 effects on household disposable income, through the means of EUROMOD tax-benefit microsimulation model. We will first identify the workers affected by the economic shock and then we will estimate the level of public support and the household incomes in particular for individuals most vulnerable. (ii) Analysis of the join micro and macro-economic impacts of the pandemic, by linking micro and macro simulation models. Indeed, micro-simulation models focus on understanding the effect of changes in tax and benefit arrangements on the distribution of incomes, with limited scope for accounting the effect of general economic growth, while macroeconomic models focus on the impact of policy or underlying socio-economic trends on indicators such as output, employment, prices and average earnings, often with a limited disaggregation by sector. This linkage would offer a more robust and comprehensive understanding of the COVID-19 consequences. (iii) Analysis of the COVID-19 effects on multidimensional poverty and vulnerability. Indeed, income is only one of the aspects that define human well-being, which is a multidimensional concept, depending on monetary and non- monetary variables. We will first estimate and nowcast up-to-date values of the different well-being dimensions, starting from available micro and macro data and applying different statistical and machine learning techniques. We will then move to an empirical analysis of poverty and vulnerability incidence at local level (across the Italian regions, with a particular focus on Lombardy) and by sub-groups (age and gender, in particular). (iv) Construction of integrated and massive datasets, obtained from heterogeneous sources, by merging the micro and macro datasets, used as input data in the previous phases of the project, with the datasets obtained as final output of the simulation analysis carried out, containing estimated and predicted values of the different well-being dimensions (disposable income, wealth, health, education, housing conditions,...) after the Covid-19 pandemic. (v) Evaluation of the existing policies and proposal of new strategies, by identifying bottom up policy recommendations and detecting risks and/or problems of social exclusions and related negative welfare impacts. A truly multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach will be ado