The Great Lockdown: International Risk Sharing Through Trade and Policy Coordination

Philipp Engler, Nathalie Pouokam, Diego Rodriguez Guzman () and Irina Yakadina

No 2020/242, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: Voluntary and government-mandated lockdowns in response to COVID-19 have caused causing drastic reductions in economic activity around the world. We present a parsimonious two-country-SIR model with some degree of substitutability between home and foreign goods, and show that trading partners’ asynchronous entries into the global pandemic induce mutual welfare gains from trade. Those gains are realized through exchange rate adjustments that cause a temporary reallocation of production towards the economy with the lowest infection rate at any point in time. We show that international cooperation over containment policies that aim at optimizing global welfare further enhances the ability of countries to exploit trade opportunities to contain the spread of the pandemic. We characterize the Nash game of strategic choices of containment policies as a prisoners’ dilemma.

Keywords: Great Lockown; epidemic; trade; optimal containment; cooperation; SIR macro model; WP; containment policy; home economy; expenditure switching; possibilities frontier; infection externality; terms of trade adjustment; COVID-19; Consumption; Terms of trade; Consumption taxes; Global (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29
Date: 2020-11-13
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=49861 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:2020/242

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 ().