This is sombre news for Australians as the projected unemployment from the coronavirus pandemic could lead to one quarter of the workforce being unemployed. And, once small businesses lose the critical momentum to keep going, they simply may not be able to restart. I walked through the city to find a place where I could use a computer, no easy task in itself, but it was all a ghost town, shops closed everywhere. It reminded me of the deserted streets scene form post-apocalyptic movies such ads On the Beach (1959):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMzEWpKKOZs&list=PLLt_OPRHy_8iZyl7a5A7-V-TWmI3MavJx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNju8IjExn4
https://theconversation.com/the-charts-that-show-coronavirus-pushing-up-to-a-quarter-of-the-workforce-out-of-work-136603
“We knew it would be bad. But we’d hoped it wouldn’t be quite this bad. Over the past few weeks, we at Grattan Institute have been working on ways to estimate the impact of the COVID-19 shutdown on jobs in Australia. It’s a complex task, with few obvious precedents. The results, detailed in our new working paper, “Shutdown: estimating the COVID-19 employment shock”, are worrying. Our estimate is that between a sixth and a quarter of Australia’s workforce is likely to be out of work because of the COVID-19 shutdown and social distancing. It derives from two sources of information. The first is data from the United States on the extent to which each occupation requires workers to be near other people. The “physical proximity” requirements of a job are generally likely to be a good guide to how likely it is the job can continue during the shutdown. The second source of information is a set of estimates by Grattan researchers of the extent to which jobs are under threat in each of 88 industries in Australia. Our preferred method for estimating the hit to jobs combines both these sources. We also use two alternative methods, each of which is relying on a single source of data, which are outlined in our working paper. Our preferred method finds that about 26% of workers – 3.4 million Australians – could be thrown out of work as a direct result of the shutdown and social distancing. The alternative methods produce figures that are lower, but still distressingly high.”
