The Economic Effects of COVID-19 Containment Measures

Pragyan Deb, Davide Furceri, Jonathan Ostry and Nour Tawk

No 2020/158, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: Containment measures are crucial to halt the spread of the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic but entail large short-term economic costs. This paper tries to quantify these effects using daily global data on real-time containment measures and indicators of economic activity such as Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) emissions, flights, energy consumption, maritime trade, and mobility indices. Results suggest that containment measures have had, on average, a very large impact on economic activity—equivalent to a loss of about 15 percent in industrial production over a 30-day period following their implementation. Using novel data on fiscal and monetary policy measures used in response to the crisis, we find that these policy measures were effective in mitigating some of these economic costs. We also find that while workplace closures and stay-at-home orders are more effective in curbing infections, they are associated with the largest economic costs. Finally, while easing of containment measures has led to a pickup in economic activity, the effect has been lower (in absolute value) than that from the tightening of measures.

Keywords: WP; containment measure; public transport; policy response; types containment; time trend; measures to the spread; stringency index; different containment measure; costly containment measure; containment measures to the spread of the virus; relaxation of containment measure; monetary policy support; measures to the spread of the virus; COVID-19; Industrial production; Fiscal stimulus; Central bank policy rate; Global; pandemics; containment measures; monetary policy stimulus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44
Date: 2020-08-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (55)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=49571 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Economic Effects of COVID-19 Containment Measures (2022)
Working Paper: The Economic Effects of COVID-19 Containment Measures (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2020/158

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akshay Modi ().