Professor Peter Urwin, Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Westminster, wrote an article for The Conversation about the coronavirus vaccine and unemployment in the UK.
In the article Professor Urwin discussed employment policy in the UK. He wrote: “It has been difficult to follow the details of frequently changing employment policy in the UK since March, with more to come in the spending review. To get to the heart of this policy debate it is important to understand the ‘tricky balancing act’ that the chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, has alluded to since the start of the pandemic.
“The competing aims that need to be balanced, of protecting jobs but not dampening incentives for job creation, were most obvious at the end of September when the chancellor announced details of the Job Support Scheme (JSS) – replacing the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) or ‘furlough’ as most people call it.”
He later added: “With the prospect of a vaccine, the previous projections, calculations and activities of companies can now credibly be used to forecast the future and give some idea of viability. The certainty that vaccines will bring, together with the chancellor’s support to the end of March, now mean we have a real chance of avoiding a doubling of unemployment in 2021.”
Read the full article on The Conversation’s website.
