Economic recovery post-COVID-19 will be structured around answering a number of fundamental questions. It is necessary to take stock of the extent of the recovery and of the transformation our economies have experienced in the last year and a half.

Unpaid work carried out inside the home has increased in the pandemic, and evidence points to women’s share in care responsibilities and domestic tasks remaining higher than those of men in the pandemic, continuing the gender divides of past decades.

Too much blood in terms of unemployment and sweat in terms of intellectual effort has been spent on trying to determine the amount of fiscal space that economies have — our policy focus instead should be on what to do with the fiscal space that almost all advanced economies (and a surprising...