Flattening the Unemployment Curve

As COVID-19 cuts its path across the world, attention is shifting away from the immediate need to contain a public health crisis and toward the crisis’s impact on jobs. Flattening the unemployment curve is key to restarting economies and inoculating workers from long-term effects associated with the economic downturn. But policymakers in the United States and Europe have used very different protective measures to ward off COVID-19-induced job loss, resulting in best and worst case scenarios for initial jobless claims. This B|Visual infographic charts these diverging scenarios, while detailing some of the policy responses taken to date.

Print