Financial Resilience Perspective on COVID-19 Business Support: A Comparative Study of Four European Countries

This paper investigates COVID-19 business support in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and Portugal. Simple and generally applicable programs for wage and fixed-cost support are predominant. From a financial resilience perspective, support programs can be seen as coping responses to the crisis through attempts at bouncing back to the situation before the virus outbreak. This also holds for the dynamics of the support during the pandemic, where governments balanced the desire to return to normal economic circumstances that called for stricter access conditions, and the need to provide support for a longer-lasting pandemic that required the opposite. Bouncing-forward responses, such as setting up new post-shock configurations, were largely absent, which is likely to be due to the need for quick and adequate responses that gave limited time for critical reflection. The impacts of business support on the number of bankruptcies and employment figures were positive. Unemployment and fiscal impacts diverged among the four countries, and it is suggested that governmental structure was influential: unitary states performed better than federal states. The paper also reflects on the lessons learned from COVID-19 for support in future crises, like the recent energy crisis, and points to an increasing attention to information-sharing within the government system, but also notes limited progress in critical thinking.