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Artículo de revista ; Labour markets in the euro area in 2020 Q2 were severely affected by the COVID 19 lockdown measures. In this context, the conventional concepts of employment and unemployment are insufficient to describe labour market developments. Job retention schemes averted potential redundancies and replaced them with temporary lay-offs and reductions in working hours. Further, many workers who lost their jobs were unable to seek work owing to mobility restrictions. Accordingly, under the conventional measure of unemployment, they were not considered unemployed. A broader measure of the unemployment rate, taking into account this type of inactivity and temporary lay-offs, lifts the share of the euro area population available for work who were totally or partially unemployed in 2020 Q2 to 27%. The sharp increase in unemployment, understood in this broader sense, and the short-time work schemes prompted an unprecedented fall-off in employment in terms of hours worked. This decline was highly uneven, with Spain being the hardest-hit country. In principle, temporary lay-offs should help curb the potential hysteresis effects on the euro area's labour markets. However, the more protracted the health crisis, the more severe these effects will tend to be.

This paper analyses the level of inequality in Spain and how it evolved over the course of the past crisis and the early stages of the current recovery. To this end, it first introduces the various dimensions of wage, income, consumption and wealth inequality, and studies how they have developed. The analysis shows less wage dispersion in Spain than in other comparable economies, even after the crisis years, while the surge in unemployment during the period resulted in a high level of inequality in per capita income. The level of inequality in Spain is more moderate when total gross household income is analysed, decreasing during the crisis as a result of pensions developing more favourably than other sources of income, in conjunction with young people delaying setting up home. Inequality in per capita consumption rose during the crisis, particularly as a result of a decrease in expenditure on consumer durables by low-income households. Wealth inequality exceeds income inequality and increased during the downturn as a result of financial assets outperforming real assets. Nevertheless, Spain's wealth inequality is moderate by international standards, as ownership of real assets is more widespread than in other countries. The way inequality has evolved during the early stages of the current economic recovery shows that falling unemployment has enabled a reduction in wage income inequality, as well as in per capita income inequality, albeit to a lesser extent.