【经济专栏第②期】Covid-19和自主就业：危机开始后的六个月-渊学通教育

【经济专栏第②期】Covid-19和自主就业：危机开始后的六个月

下面我们就进入正文咯：

LSE经济绩效中心“Covid-19和自主就业：危机开始后的六个月”新闻导读及Alevel经济考点讲解

——结合AS/A2经济科考点点评实时新闻资讯

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Covid-19 and the self-employed: Six months into the crisis

Introduction

Six months after Covid-19 first hit, it is clear that it is the greatest economic crisis of the modern age. The economy has contracted far more rapidly than in previous crises, with GDP dropping by a record 19.5 per centin April (ONS, 2020b), and despite four subsequent consecutive monthly increases since then, remaining 9.2 per cent below the February 2020 level in August. Early indicators suggest at best a slow recovery that is stalling (IHS Markit, 2020) as the country faces a new wave of cases and harsher and localised restrictions on economic activity. The Centre for Economic Performance’s finding of a disproportionate effect of the crisis on self-employed workers back in May has now been corroborated in other studies and confirmed in official statistics (Cominetti et al., 2020; Reuschke et al., 2020; ONS, 2020a).

We have now moved into a new phase of the crisis, characterised by more sector-specific restrictions, less direct government support for workers and local lockdowns, and a second month long national lockdown coming into place. The Self-employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS) delivered much-needed support to many self-employed workers throughout the Spring and the Summer. In his Winter Economy plan, the Chancellor announced that the scheme would be extended until next April. The policy details are changing ata rapid pace. At the time of writing, future generosity levels have been restored to those of the first SEISS grant.2

Most recently the government has discussed its vision for the post-Covid economy,3 framing the crisis now as a structural change rather than a short-term shock to be weathered. With a new policy emphasis placed on reskilling workers, it is likely that the make-up of the workforce in the next decade will differ substantially to that of the last decade. In light of their vulnerability to Covid-19 risks and associated policy responses, the self-employed will not be exempt from this.

Given this rapidly changing environment, in this short policy brief we provide an update on how the selfemployed are faring in the crisis. From 9 - 13 September we ran an online survey of 1,500 self-employed workers covering their working lives, concerns and expectations for the future. Responses are weighted to represent the population of self-employed workers using the latest aggregates from the Labour Force Survey. While our results do not replace official statistics, by tailoring our survey we are able to zoom in on the issuesthat are particularly relevant to self-employed workers and shed light on their beliefs and expectations in a way that other surveys are not.

App-based workers are different, with strong evidence of one-sided flexibility

A growing set of self-employed workers find work through digital apps. These workers are the most associated with the “gig economy” and include private-hire drivers, parcel delivery drivers and food delivery drivers. These workers make up 8 per cent of our survey participants, are younger and are more likely to be from a minority ethnic background than other self-employed workers.

In terms of how they are being affected by the crisis, these workers exhibit significantly different patterns to others in self-employment. Between a quarter and a third (28 per cent) of these workers actually report having more work than usual in August, relative to 8 per cent of other self-employed workers.

App workers are unusual in that their work cannot in general by performed remotely, yet they continue to work at similar levels to before the crisis. Given this, it is unsurprising that over three out of every four (78 per cent) app-worker respondents perceived their health to be at risk during work throughout the crisis. Among other self-employed workers, the figure is 23 per cent.

文章中AL经济知识点解析

知识点分析：在CIE考试局IGCSE政府和宏观经济章节，就业模式变化的知识点中，自主就业(self- employed)作为逐渐发展形成的新的工作模式，其主体最大的特点就是没有雇主，或者说自己作为自己的雇主经营工作。此次疫情的影响由短期的经济冲击逐渐升级为就业市场结构性的改变，对此，自主就业者的工作时长和收入都受到了一定程度的负面影响。而那些基于APP工作的自主就业者，由于具备灵活的工作时间、工作地点等，再加上疫情所导致线上消费业务的例外增长，这些“零工经济(gig economic)”的主体反而受到了较小程度的负面影响，这一部分同样在弹性就业(flexible employment)的知识点中也有体现。

对应知识点：

Employed and self-employed

In some countries, including the UK, USA and most of Europe, most people work for someone else, that is they are employees. The number of self-employed workers is, however, rising. In other countries, including India and Pakistan, a high proportion of people are already self-employed and many of them work in the informal economy.

Flexible employment

Global competition is putting pressure on firms to ensure that their labour force is flexible.

A flexible labour force is one which adjusts quickly and smoothly to changes in market conditions. This flexibility can take a number of different forms.

One is in terms of the number of workers employed. The easier it is to hire and fire workers, the more able firms are in adjusting their output in line with consumer demand. Such flexibility, which can be called numerical flexibility, can increase workers' sense of job insecurity, but it can also raise employment. This is because firms may be more willing to take on more workers when demand for their products rises if they know they can let them go, should demand fall.

Other forms of flexibility are temporal flexibility (the ability to change the number of hours people work), locational flexibility (the ability to change the location where workers work), functional flexibility (the ability to change the tasks workers perform) and wage flexibility (the ability to raise or lower wages).

So why did these workers continue to work despite the risk? One explanation is of course that there were strong financial incentives. Exceptional growth in online shopping fuelled a strong demand for parcel delivery and concerns over eating out drove consumers to ordering in food, so it could be that wages were good and workerswere prepared to take the risks. Furthermore, workers have bills to pay and may not have the luxury of not working temporarily. Indeed, in Figure 3 we see that across the three main types of app workers, around 60 per cent of workers report pay as being a key reason why they continued to work despite health risks.

A key argument made by app-based companies is that their workers have the flexibility to choose when they work. Despite this claim, we find that 54 per cent of parcel delivery drivers and 52 per cent of private hire drivers work out of a fear of losing future work. At least in the eyes of many workers, flexibility is distinctly one-sided. This finding has strong implications for discussions over whether gig economy workers represent ‘bogus’ self-employment.

此次疫情期间，零工经济受到的冲击较小，这背后的经济学原理你get到了吗？