COVID-19 disaster and employment generation program in a developing economy.

We develop a three-sector Harris-Todaro (HT)-type model for a developing economy to analyse the failure of the employment generation program in the rural sector as a policy response to counter Covid-19-induced reverse migration of labour. First, we distinguish between two alternative modes of implementation of the program and show how they produce diverse outcomes on both unemployment and welfare. Welfare is measured in terms of Sen's (Sen, J Public Econ 4:387-403, 1974) index which is inequality (distributional) sensitive.