Recovery, Renewal, Resilience

Local and national governments are investing significant resources in recovery of public health, economic and employment regeneration, humanitarian assistance, among other areas. Consideration of budget constraints is crucial – for example, the OECD uses Spain as an example to highlight the dual-task: support vulnerable people and reduce public spending. Consider strategies to prevent fiscal debt following recovery from COVID-19:

• Implement the use of subsidies for vulnerable populations during recovery
• Promote efficient use of resources, e.g. focus on sectors most severely impacted and have strong productivity potential, such as small-medium businesses
• Re-regulate future retirement arrangements for workers (e.g. measures such as “disincentivise early retirement”) to reduce the gap between the average labour market exit age and the statutory retirement age
• Identify local jobs which can be targeted toward the unemployed/marginalized (e.g. infrastructure/green economy jobs created through recovery and renewal strategies) and skills development opportunities (e.g. through apprenticeships) to increase employability
• Make public spending transparent using ICT platforms. Specify how much is spent, in which programmes, and the number of beneficiaries