Search

Widespread lockdowns and social distancing in economies affected by the coronavirus outbreak are set to cause a massive negative short-term impact on consumer spending and GDP. A large chunk of consumer spending is discretionary and so is very sensitive to being postponed or lost completely due to quarantines and social distancing. The early evidence from China supports the idea that up-front effects will be large, with retail sales down 20% y/y in January-February and industrial output over 13% lower, thanks to widespread factory closures. We estimate that a three-week lockdown affecting 50%-90% of a population would cut consumption in the three-month period featuring such a lockdown by 5%-8%, a six-week lockdown by 9%-16%, and a 12-week lockdown would slash it by 18%-32%. Full-year effects depend on how quickly postponed consumption revives as outbreaks come under control. But even...

We develop an econometric model of consumer panic (or panic buying) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using Google search data on relevant keywords, we construct a daily index of consumer panic for 54 countries from January to late April 2020. We also assemble data on government policy announcements and daily COVID-19 cases for all countries. Our panic index reveals widespread consumer panic in most countries, primarily during March, but with significant variation in the timing and severity of panic between countries. Our model implies that both domestic and world virus transmission contribute significantly to consumer panic. But government policy is also important: Internal movement restrictions – whether announced by domestic or foreign governments – generate substantial short run panic that largely vanishes in a week to ten days. Internal movement restrictions announced early in the...

We measure the effect of lockdown policies on employment and GDP across countries using individual- and sector-level data. Employment effects depend on the ability to work from home, which ranges from about half of total employment in rich countries to around 35% in poor countries. This gap reflects differences in occupational composition, self-employment levels, and individual characteristics across countries. GDP effects of lockdown policies also depend on countries’ sectoral structure. Losses in poor countries are attenuated by their higher value-added share in essential sectors, notably agriculture. Overall, a realistic lockdown policy implies GDP losses of 20-25% on an annualized basis.

The COVID-19 global pandemic has caused significant global economic and social disruption. In McKibbin and Fernando (2020), we used data from historical pandemics to explore seven plausible scenarios of the economic consequences if COVID-19 were to become a global pandemic. In this paper, we use currently observed epidemiological outcomes across countries and recent data on sectoral shutdowns and economic shocks to estimate the likely global economic impacts of the pandemic under six new scenarios. The first scenario explores the outcomes if the current course of COVID-19 is successfully controlled, and there is only a mild recurrence in 2021. We then explore scenarios where the opening of economies results in recurrent outbreaks of various magnitudes and countries respond with and without economic shutdowns. We also explore the impact if no vaccine becomes available and the world...

We discuss the impact of a Covid-like shock on a simple toy economy, described by the Mark-0 Agent-Based Model that we developed and discussed in a series of previous papers. We consider a mixed supply and demand shock, and show that depending on the shock parameters (amplitude and duration), our toy economy can display V-shaped, U-shaped or W-shaped recoveries, and even an L-shaped output curve with permanent output loss. This is due to the existence of a self-sustained “bad” state of the economy. We then discuss two policies that attempt to moderate the impact of the shock: giving easy credit to firms, and the so-called helicopter money, i.e. injecting new money into the households savings. We find that both policies are effective if strong enough, and we highlight the potential danger of terminating these policies too early. Interestingly, when policy is successful, inflation...

We study the effects of international supply chain disruptions on real economic activity and prices during the Covid-19 pandemic. We show that US sectors with a large exposure to intermediate goods imports from China contracted significantly and robustly more than other sectors. In particular, highly exposed sectors suffered larger declines in production, employment, imports, and exports. Moreover, input and output prices moved up relative to other sectors, suggesting that real activity declines in sectors with a high China exposure were not particularly driven by a slump in demand. Quantitatively, differences in China exposures accounts for about 9% of the cross-sectoral variance of industrial production growth during March and April 2020. The estimated effects are short-lived effects and dissipate by July.

The COVID-19 pandemic has a severely negative impact on economic activity. We analyze whether and to what extent mandatory social distancing imposed by lockdown policies and voluntary social distancing triggered by COVID-19 fatality rates have driven growth developments in the first and second quarter of 2020. Based on a sample of 46 countries and making use of OLS, IV and panel fixed effects regressions we find that the stringency of lockdown policies drives growth developments over time, while fatality rates carry an additional weight in explaining cross-country growth differences for each quarter. Finally, vulnerabilities to mandatory and social distancing performed abroad captured by tourism exposure and trade openness, play a non-negligible role in explaining growth differences across countries in the first half of 2020.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) represents a simultaneous health and economic shock for the vast majority of countries around the world and a wide range of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) have been used by policymakers to mitigate its spread. It is recognised that this entails an implicit trade-off between health and economic outcomes. This paper investigates this trade-off for 106 developed and developing countries by linking NPIs with quarterly economic growth outcomes. The results indicate that the NPIs that negatively affect growth differ between Advanced Economies (AEs) and Emerging Market and Developing Economies (EMDEs). Testing policy was found to have helped in mitigating the negative economic impact in EMDEs. COVID-19 mortality had a larger impact in EMDEs compared to AEs. Overall, the results might suggest a more favourable short-term trade-off between...

Using high-frequency proxies for economic activity over a large sample of countries, we show that the economic crisis during the first seven months of the COVID-19 pandemic was only partly due to government lockdowns. Economic activity also contracted severely because of voluntary social distancing in response to higher infections. Furthermore, we show that lockdowns substantially reduced COVID-19 cases, especially if they were introduced early in a country’s epidemic. This implies that, despite involving short-term economic costs, lockdowns may pave the way to a faster recovery by containing the spread of the virus and reducing voluntary social distancing. Finally, we document that lockdowns entail decreasing marginal economic costs but increasing marginal benefits in reducing infections. This suggests that tight short-lived lockdowns are preferable to mild prolonged measures.

Evidence is provided as to how government containment and closure policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in affected firm-level employment and hours worked and the differential employment impacts of such policies between men and women. The analysis uses data from the World Bank’s Enterprise Analysis Unit survey of business enterprises owners and top managers located in 20 emerging nations about the impact that COVID-19 had on their business operations. Several principal conclusions are drawn from the analysis. First, containment and closure policies, viewed as a whole, impacted negatively permanent jobs and total hours worked at the firm level, but not temporary employment. Second, school and workplace closing policies increased the likelihood that firms reduced permanent employment, but the impact did not fall disproportionately on women. Third, public transport closings...