The Impact of the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Trade between Canada and the United States

Miguel Cardoso and Brandon Malloy

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: We examine how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted trade between Canada and the U.S., using a novel dataset on monthly bilateral trade flows between Canadian provinces and U.S. states, merged with COVID-19 health data. We find a statistically significant and robust negative relationship between the severity of COVID-19 and changes in Canadian exports and imports. Our results show that a one-standard deviation rise in COVID-19 severity in a Canadian province leads to a fall of 3.1-4.9\% in exports and a 6.7-9.1\% fall in imports. This result is robust to the measure of COVID-19 severity used: case levels, hospitalizations or deaths. We also investigate the role of COVID-19 policy responses and find that lockdown stringency measures did not significantly affect Canadian export or import flows. Decomposing our analysis by industry, we determine that trade in the relatively more labour-intensive manufacturing industry was most negatively affected by the pandemic, while the agriculture industry suffered the least disruption to trade flows. Collectively our results suggest that while trade was most adversely affected in industries and regions hardest hit by the pandemic, government-imposed lockdown restrictions do not appear to have caused significant additional decreases in Canadian exports or imports.

Keywords: COVID-19; international trade; lockdown restrictions; manufacturing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F15 F53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/234989/1/C ... OVID-19-Pandemic.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Impact of the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Trade between Canada and the United States (2021)
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:zbw:esprep:234989

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().