Will Banks, Sudipto Karmakar and Danny Walker
This post is the first of a series of posts about the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on business activity.
During the pandemic, UK businesses have received unprecedented levels of government support, set to total 9% of GDP. This has mainly been through the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS), under which 1 in 3 employees have been furloughed, and the government-guaranteed loan schemes that were used by 1 in 4 businesses. Despite the scale of this support, little has been said about which businesses received it. In this post we combine data on loan scheme and CJRS usage with a data set on the characteristics of businesses. We find that small, relatively old and sophisticated, labour-intensive businesses in the sectors most vulnerable to the impacts of the pandemic are most likely to have received both types of support.
| Comment | See all comments |
