Since the crisis started at the beginning of 2020, businesses have been experiencing lower activity levels. The hope of a quick recovery leads them to try, as much as they can, to keep on their employees, favouring part-time work and temporary lay-offs over letting people go entirely.

Inadequate minimum old-age pensions and insufficient social security contributions were the challenges that the Social Security Fund (SSF, hereafter the Fund) of Libya had to overcome by consulting the Libyan Centre for Research and Actuarial Studies, which resulted in an increase in the contributions rate from 15 per cent to 20.5 per cent, thus enabling the Fund to raise the minimum old-age pension by 100 per cent.

The pace of development of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on social and economic life took everyone by surprise. Lockdown of entire sectors of the economy and restrictions in everyday functions caused serious disruptions of economic processes and had a significant impact on the condition of many enterprises and the labour market situation. To minimise the negative impact of the pandemic on the economy, the government introduced the aid programme known as the Anti-Crisis Shield (ACS).

The labour market has been hard hit by the coronavirus crisis. In 2020, Belgium’s National Employment Office (Office national de l’emploi – ONEM) compensated some 2.3 million people, that is, one in every three workers. It also provided support to two in every three employers, some 70 per cent more than usual. Many workers found themselves temporarily unemployed for the first time and needing to make recourse to unemployment benefits.

To enhance support, the Public Employment Service (Arbetsförmedlingen ‒ PES) of Sweden has developed a model to automatically estimate and purpose a search strategy on top of its traditional working streams, taking in consideration the job seeker’s educational background and vocational history to match them with the demands on the labour market. The model estimates a plan regarding the profession the jobseeker should primarily focus on, and the number of jobs one should preferably apply for optimizing his/her efforts for resolving his/her unemployment.

During the pandemic, the Government of Brunei Darussalam introduced measures to address the impact of COVID-19 in the country. This was carried out with a “Whole of Nation Approach” – United in addressing the impact and challenges arising from the spread of COVID-19 in Brunei Darussalam. The steps undertaken are focused on three main components, namely, maintaining the well-being of the public, protecting jobs, and providing support for individuals as well as supporting and assisting businesses.

The COVID-19 pandemic had a severe impact on South Africa’s economy and the livelihood of its citizens. Many South Africans lost their incomes as a result of the pandemic and subsequent lock-down regulations. In an effort to provide relief, South Africa introduced a special COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress grant (cSRD) to address income support gap and food insecurity.

France’s Council for the Social Protection of Self-Employed Workers (Conseil de la protection sociale des travailleurs indépendants – CPSTI) was created in 2019.

The internal monitoring and control of its activities is entrusted to the general scheme social security bodies (the branches working on old age, sickness and social security collection) and is based on the organization, reference systems and control plans of each branch.

Since 2020, France’s Family Branch has been committed to simplifying and harmonizing its funding for children and young people. Comprehensive Territorial Agreements (Conventions territoriales globales – CTG) are being put in place across the board and, in parallel, it is rolling out a new funding model, the territorial bonus payment. Any facility located in an area covered by a CTG and supported by local authorities that have signed a CTG will receive this territorial bonus payment. The amount varies according to the wealth of the area and its population.

Singapore’s Central Provident Fund Board (CPFB) is the Centre of Excellence for Citizen Disbursement (CD) in administering Government social transfer schemes to support Singaporeans in need with emphasis on customer centricity, operational efficiency and agility as core operating principles.

The project for the execution of the Auxílio Emergencial (Emergency aid), created by Law No. 13,982, of 2 April 2020, with the objective of guaranteeing minimum income to Brazilians in a vulnerable situation during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowed more than 100 million people to be assisted by public policy in a timely manner.

In 2020, the Polish government introduced a new form of support for Polish families and the tourism industry due to the difficult economic situation caused by the COVID-19 epidemic. This was the Polish Tourist Voucher, a benefit of 500 złoty (PLN) for each child and an additional PLN 500 for a disabled child. The electronic voucher is intended to finance hotel services or tourist events in Poland.

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Executive Office (Poder Ejecutivo Nacional – PEN) created, by Decree 310/2020, the Emergency Family Income (Ingreso Familiar de Emergencia − IFE), a non-contributory benefit of an exceptional nature. The recipients are households composed of casual workers, unemployed people, workers in private homes and those taxed under the regime for small taxpayers from the lowest categories.

France has set up a public service for the financial intermediation of maintenance allowances managed by the Agency for the Recovery of Unpaid Alimonies (Agence de recouvrement et d’intermédiation des pensions alimentaires – ARIPA), also referred to as the “Public Service for maintenance allowances” (Service public des pensions alimentaires), which includes Family benefits funds (Caisses d’allocations familiales – CAF) and Agricultural social mutual funds (Caisses de mutualité sociale agricole – MSA).

Malta has not been spared the health, economic and social effects and challenges posed by COVID-19 over most of 2020 and 2021.

The well-being of the population was understandably given top priority through restrictive and containment measures to control the spread of the virus. The programme was strongly supported by the population largely resulting in a relatively low number of infections and deaths.

The pandemic created significant social pressure in terms of access to pension and health services in Peru. Faced with this situation, 47 years after the creation of the National Pension System (Sistema Nacional de Pensiones – SNP), the Pension Standardization Office (Oficina de Normalización Previsional – ONP) has been pushing to change and improve regulations, in order to make the conditions more flexible and extend social security coverage.

Given the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Belgium’s federal crisis centre needed real-time information on its social and economic consequences for the population, particularly for vulnerable groups.

To this end, the Federal Public Service for Social Security (Service public fédéral Sécurité sociale – FPS), the FPS Employment, and the Public Planning Service (PPS) Social Integration, were requested to take an initiative to meet this monitoring need as soon as possible.

Expanding its services from assisting up to 1,200 jobseekers with employment injuries or illnesses annually in 2008, Social Security Organization (SOCSO) now delivers employment services to all categories of job seekers in Malaysia through the establishment of the MYFutureJobs National Employment Services, a framework similar to the Public Employment Services defined by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Argentina’s Superintendency of Health Services (Superintendencia de Servicios de Salud – SSSalud) ensures that citizens can freely exercise their right to switch between social security organizations. This system has been in place since 1998.

The Social Insurance Institute (SII) of Albania, as part of the digital transformation, has started to offer electronic services since 2020, but since 1st May 2022, in accordance with
DCM no. 252/2022 on the procedures for providing online services by the service-offering institutions and for the methodology of monitoring and controlling the administrative activity of their provision, all services in the field of social insurance are performed, only through the online service, on the e-Albania government platform.(https://e-albania.al/)

COVID-19 caused a crisis with economic and employment shocks, which led to increased unemployment and the self-employed shutting down businesses. With prolonged COVID-19 pandemic, there was an increase in the number of citizens (subscribers), who struggled to make payments on national pension premiums.

The National Pension Service (NPS) of the Republic of Korea made efforts to overcome the COVID-19 crisis by alleviating financial burden by temporarily waiving premium payments and payments of arrears.

The Family Benefit Funds (Caisses dallocations familiales – CAF) offer the possibility to carry out most of their procedures in digital format. Aware that the access to online administrative procedures is uneven depending on the audience, the CAF has implemented various actions to promote the digital inclusion of people.

The electronic personal loan allocation system is a programme designed to improve access, transparency and fairness in how this benefit is granted. It replaced the conventional system that was based on the delivery of supervised application forms to trade union organisations for distribution among workers.

In response to COVID-19 pandemic, the Social Security Corporation (SSC) of Jordan launched the Sustainability Programme (Istidama) in accordance with the Defence Law, issued by the government in 2020, represented by a package of procedures, aimed at securing workers in the activities and sectors most affected; providing temporary income that enables them to meet their living requirements because of the decrease in their wages.

In March 2020, the coronavirus pandemic broke out in Israel.

What began as a health crisis soon turned into an economic crisis, which led many workers to go on forced unpaid leave and went to the National Insurance Institute (NII) for assistance. There was a need to find creative solutions within the limits of the law and the data available to the NII, and to find workable and quick solutions that would allow the payment of unemployment benefits to unpaid workers.

The COVID-19 pandemic was one of the largest threats to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The lockdown was about to force employers to terminate their employees because of the inability to pay their wages. The General Organization for Social Insurance (GOSI) of Saudi Arabia was quick and agile in submitting to the legislators a recommendation by which employers are not required to pay wages of employees, employees can keep their jobs and the unemployment insurance (SANED) would compensate those employees.

The Yuyaq, Casa del Pensionista is a support programme that contributes to the healthy, productive and dignified ageing of older people at the national level; it is focused on pensioners and run by the Pension Standardization Office (Oficina de Normalización Previsional – ONP) of Peru. The programme is based on five strategies:

Unemployment, informal employment and low pension coverage have been recurrent problems in Colombia. According to a study carried out in 2023 by Colombia’s National Statistics Institute (Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística – DANE, 2023), some 57.9 per cent of the country’s population is in informal employment, and a little over half of these people earn less than the minimum wage.