COVID ‐19 emergency policies, financial security, and social equity: Worldwide evidence

Using worldwide country‐level panel data of COVID‐19 emergency policies and aggregated survey responses of 46 million randomly sampled Facebook users, we study the impact of public health and economic measures on household financial worries among various demographic groups. The analysis reveals that public health interventions with stringent mobility restrictions—domestic lockdowns and international travel restrictions—increase the proportion of households with financial stress within countries. However, economic policies with immediate disposability, like wage support and in‐kind transfers, counteract the negative impacts. Notably, younger working‐age groups are particularly sensitive to such public health and economic emergency policies in their assessment of financial security. Our results also show that a country's social safety net coverage and poverty rate moderate the financial impact. As governments face challenges in containing the pandemic, this study highlights the need to create policy packages balancing differential tradeoffs between health and economic interventions while enhancing equity objectives.