Coronavirus: State support for workers second highest in EU

About one in three or 33.4 per cent of working Cypriots received support from special schemes to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, the second highest rate in the EU 27 and nearly double the EU 27 average of 1.5 per cent, Labour Minister Zeta Emilianidou said on Wednesday.

The figures are taken from the Monitoring Report on the Employment and Social Situation in the EU following the Outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic published by the EU’s Social Protection Committee and cover the period of April 2020 to January 2021.

In a written statement, Emilianides said the government continues to support employees, which with the special schemes that will be published for June 2021 continues for the 16th consecutive month since the outbreak of the pandemic in March 2020.

Luxembourg topped the table with 40 per cent, while Croatia was a close third after Cyprus with 32.5 per cent.

“A rough comparison of the maximum reported monthly number of recipients of short time work schemes (STW) to date in each Member State to the size of the active population shows that the schemes in Croatia, Cyprus and Luxembourg were the most important in terms of peak coverage to date, with 30-40 per cent of the active population receiving support,” the report said.

“In contrast, countries such as Bulgaria, Finland, Latvia, Poland and Sweden seem to have made much lower recourse to the use of STW or similar measures, with less than 10 per cent of the active population receiving support from such measures,” it added.

Bulgaria was last on the table with 4.4 per cent, while Sweden had 6.2 and Latvia 6.5 per cent.

It is noted that some countries have employed different measures to address the impacts of the crisis on household incomes and these are described in the report.