Faced with the unprecedented economic crisis triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, the governments of major Western countries have tried to preserve household income. They succeeded overall, according to a study released Thursday by the OECD (the international organization for economic cooperation, based in Paris), which covers only the first quarter of 2020.
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The massive compensation measures for short-time working in France partly explain that the real income of French households per capita fell by only 0.3%, while the GDP per capita contracted by 6%. During the same first quarter, the income of German households fell by 1.2% (for a GDP per capita at - 2%) and that of Italians by 1.8% (for a GDP per capita at - 5%).
In the United Kingdom and in Canada, the loss of household income remained, as in France, limited at - 0.7% and - 0.2% respectively.
An unprecedented gap
Of the seven large OECD countries, the United States is the only one to have recorded an increase in per capita income of 0.7% over the period. The OECD explains it by “the more limited impact of Covid-19” and “more limited containment measures” at the start of the year.
It is for these same reasons that household income increased in Australia, Finland, the Netherlands and Greece.
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Never, notes the study, had there been such a large positive difference between the evolution of GDP per capita and that of household income since the fourth quarter of 2008. The "great confinement" however took place above all in spring. It is not certain that the limitation of income losses will continue in the second and third quarters, as several countries have reduced the generosity of compensation measures for partial activity.
