As soon as the scale of the coronavirus shock to the economy became clear, the UK government introduced three policies to protect directly household incomes: a Job Retention Scheme, to pay the wages of employees who were temporarily furloughed; a Self-Employment Income Support Scheme, to give grants to established self-employed people whose businesses had been affected; and a package of increases to entitlements to social security benefits, with Universal Credit at the core, that bolstered the UK’s means-tested ‘safety net’. This paper analyses the design and beneficiaries of these policies and, given the distributional pattern of the labour market shock, considers the emerging overall impact on living standards, particularly of low-income households.

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A small system dynamics model of the heroin supply in the United States has proved useful in estimating heroin imports and anticipating effects of changes in imports. This paper describes the structure of the model and its application to import data over a ten‐year period. Of particular interest is the way in which the model has been used to flag inconsistencies and fill gaps in federal data.

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