Unemployment and Income Support Before and After COVID 2022 | Austaxpolicy | 5 April 2022 | Webinar

here is a further challenge in understanding these developments. The ABS Survey of Income and Housing (SIH) identifies individuals by their labour force status and their receipt of social security payments, allowing more direct comparisons in one data source of differences between labour market status and benefit receipt before COVID.

In brief, more people receive unemployment payments than the ABS measure as unemployed, but most of the unemployed did not receive these benefits before COVID.

This presentation draws on a paper by Peter Whiteford and Bruce Bradbury (forthcoming) that explores the differences between these indicators of labour market trends in Australia, highlighting changes in social security policy over time that contribute to these differences, and seeks to identify factors associated with the further divergence.

The paper discusses the implications of these differences for analysis of the state of the Australian labour market, the assessment of the wellbeing of disadvantaged groups, as well as implications for social security policy and future research.

2022 Speaker

Peter Whiteford
Professor, The Crawford School