Between 65,000 and 180,000 people have been able to keep their jobs in 2020 thanks to the support package for companies. The Central Planning Bureau (CPB) has calculated this in a evaluation of the support package in that year. It is estimated that the economy would have contracted about 0.6 percent more without the support package.
The support package was therefore effective in 2020, the planning office concludes. Many people maintained their incomes, unemployment did not rise rapidly and very few companies went bankrupt.
In the evaluation, the CPB only looked at corona year 2020 and not at the current year. The support package for companies has been in effect since March 2020 and ends on 1 October.
Crown 2020
The agency calculated what would have happened without the aid measures. This concerns the wage support with which affected companies could receive a subsidy to continue paying wages (NOW scheme), the allowance for fixed costs (TVL) and the income support for the self-employed (Tozo).
Many companies have survived thanks to the support package. This only applies to companies that would probably have gone bankrupt without the corona crisis. This could mean that the economy will grow less rapidly in the future, according to the CPB. “As the crisis lasted longer, these (hidden) costs of aid policies increased and the benefits of job retention decreased,” the researchers write.
Since the summer of 2020, the economic uncertainty has diminished, the CPB writes. The disadvantages of the aid increased and the advantages diminished. “To be able to say more about the trade-off between the benefits and costs of support policy over time, more research is needed, including into the effects of the support package in 2021,” the researchers say.
CPB director Pieter Hasekamp called in april 2021 because of these arguments to stop the aid as soon as possible. “The current support is freezing parts of the economy to the situation at the beginning of 2020, blocking normal economic dynamics: companies closing down and new companies starting up, people finding new jobs elsewhere,” Hasekamp said.
The cabinet eventually decided to let the package run until October this year.
Bigger than other countries
The planning office also looked at the Dutch support package in comparison with packages in other countries. The size of the support, including wage support and the allowance for fixed costs, in the Netherlands was about 3.6 percent of the gross domestic product in 2020: about 30 billion euros. According to the CPB, this is slightly higher than the European average of 3.3 percent of GDP.
More than half of the expenditure on the support package in the Netherlands went to wage support for companies. According to the research institute, the subsidy that employers received was high compared to other countries. A relatively large number of companies also made use of the scheme. The economy in the Netherlands contracted relatively less sharply and unemployment rose less rapidly.
The Netherlands also benefited from the support packages in countries around us. These reduced the risk of a European crisis and kept exports up to par.
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