Early expectations that recovery from the COVID-19 recession would be V-shaped, a rapid snap-back with employment restored in its former pattern, have been abandoned.

The recession will be deeper than the downturn that followed the financial crash of 2008 and recovery will take time. Two economists from MIT in Boston, David Autor and Elisabeth Reynolds, argue in a recent paper that the labour market will look different under a number of headings. There will be much more remote working, a squeeze on traditional retailing and on business travel.

There will be a retreat from city-centre offices and support businesses to the suburbs. Automation in manufacturing and in many other businesses will accelerate and, finally, the smaller business units will not all survive, and many sectors will see consolidation and larger average firm sizes.

They reckon that the availability of lower-paid jobs will diminish – the sectors worst affected such as retail, public transport and the hospitality industry will suffer most and these sectors employ mainly lower-paid workers.

Governments will be foolish to seek the retention of pre-existing firms and jobs and would be well-advised to focus on the shape of the future economy and the implications for education and training.

Some of these developments are a surprise, others no more than the acceleration of trends already evident before the COVID-19 crisis came along.

Process automation and robotics have been replacing workers for decades, but the demands of social distancing have spurred the adoption of new technologies.

Online shopping has boomed through the lockdowns all over the developed world and traditional retailers are announcing closures and redundancies daily.

The extensive adoption of the work-from-home model has been one of the surprises – firms have expressed high satisfaction with the new arrangements and, for many, there will be no going back.

The future of city centres is called into question by several of these developments. The flight of “big-box” retailing (white goods and furniture) to the out-of-town centres has been under way for decades but the future of city-centre department stores and fashion outlets is threatened by the new impetus to online shopping.

Office space

If remote working comes to be normalised for substantial numbers of employees, there will be a fall in demand for office space.

There are already complaints in many cities where lockdown has been eased that the return to work has not materialised as expected – bad news for city bars, taxis, restaurants and entertainment businesses.

Urban public transport has suffered and will face permanent viability challenges unless social distancing can be dispensed with, which needs an effective vaccine and its widespread adoption.

The preferred mode of travel in a pandemic is the single-occupancy private car.

The other headache for cities could be a permanent decline in business travel. Aside from the transmission risk so long as the virus is around, firms have realised that teleconferencing is cheaper and people are getting used to it.

That is bad news for airlines, airports and city-centre hotels.

None of this means that cities will go into decline, but it could mean a change of character for the central areas, with perhaps their revival as residential areas.

The adjustments as a result of COVID-19 will be superimposed on changes that are inevitable as the world economy finally begins to take climate action seriously.

If the car fleet is to be decarbonised over the next two decades, a goal to which the Irish and many other governments are committed, there will be big changes to the taxation of motoring, which currently consists largely of fuel taxes.

When cars, and perhaps light vans, are powered mainly with renewable electricity, the case for heavy taxes on their source of traction is undermined. This could open the way for electronic road pricing and for congestion charging – a system where, courtesy of in-vehicle technology and GPS tracking, the road user pays heavily on busy roads at peak and little on empty rural roads.

The combination of congestion charging with the rise of remote working could see the end of traffic jams for commuters and would weaken the case for expensive investments in urban rail technologies.

The COVID-19 crisis must be handled, in Ireland as everywhere else, as an unwelcome and hopefully temporary burden additional to the imperative to address climate change.

Had COVID-19 never emerged, the world’s leaders would have been preoccupied for the next decade with the construction, after a long period of inadequate response, of co-ordinated measures to cut carbon emissions.

These two crises, global in nature, must now be addressed in a world with leaders of important countries, including Brazil and the US, in denial about the seriousness of both.

For Ireland, the priority will be the promotion of EU policies which contain the COVID-19 damage without aggravating the costs of climate action.

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