Background Note
COVID-19 and socioeconomic impact in Asia
Several countries have enacted lockdown measures in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to protect their health systems and reduce the number of mortalities. One of the most extreme national lockdown measures has been taken by the government of India...
Blog
How Africa can fight the pandemic
by
Arkebe Oqubay
April 2020
The response to Africa’s COVID-19 plight must be swift and at scale rather than too little, too late. In a world short of progressive global...
Background Note
COVID-19 and socioeconomic impact in Africa
The COVID-19 pandemic has now spread to over 180 countries, including several countries in sub-Saharan Africa.1 Kenya reported its first COVID-19 case on 13 March 2020. By 31 March the number of confirmed cases had risen to 59, with over 70 per cent...
Working Paper
An assessment of the effects of COVID-19 pandemic on Kenya’s trade
We examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Kenya’s foreign trade using quarterly trade data for the period 2019 to the second quarter of 2021. The exploratory analysis shows that growth of Kenya’s merchandise exports remained resilient...
Journal Article
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the poor
We examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the livelihoods of the poor in a semi-rural setting in Bangladesh. We use an unusually rich dataset which tracks the economic and financial transactions of sixty poor and very poor individuals and...
Working Paper
The role of trust and of poverty in compliance with social distancing measures in Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic
Since it began, the COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a number of challenges on Africa and the rest of the world. Following the recommendations of the World Health Organization, many countries imposed social distancing measures and cancelled non...
Working Paper
Forecasting recovery from COVID-19 using financial data
We develop a new methodology to nowcast the effects of the COVID-19 crisis and forecast its evolution in small, export-oriented countries. To this aim, we exploit variation in financial indexes at the industry level and relate them to the expected...
Blog
Why countries best placed to handle the pandemic appear to have fared the worst
During the first year of the pandemic, it was wealthier countries, with their comparatively stronger health systems, civil services, legal systems and...
Journal Article
Analysis of the distributional effects of COVID-19 and state-led remedial measures in South Africa
This study explores the impact of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa on income poverty and inequality in South Africa. Using a static tax-benefit microsimulation model with input datasets that were adjusted to reflect people’s...
Working Paper
Peruvian response to COVID-19 pandemic
Why does a state like Peru, dedicated to fulfilling development goals and sustained good macroeconomic performance, appear incapable of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic? Using the case of maternal mortality, this paper argues that the tremendous...
Working Paper
Social distress and (some) relief
Up-to-date, nationally representative household income/expenditure data are crucial to estimating poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic and to policy-making more broadly, but South Africa lacks such data. We present new pandemic poverty estimates...
Working Paper
Physical proximity and occupational employment change by gender during the COVID-19 pandemic
Previous economic downturns such as the 2008–09 Global Financial Crisis disproportionately affected male employment due to greater contractions in industries typically filled by men (e.g., manufacturing). However, after the imposition of the ‘hard’...
Working Paper
The pandemic and the state
COVID-19 has brought to the fore the issue of state preparedness in mitigating health emergencies. This paper problematizes the received wisdom of greater state capacity in mitigating the severity of the pandemic. Based on a case study of West Bengal...
Working Paper
Corruption and crisis: do institutions matter?
While the short-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on lives and livelihoods are well understood, we know little about the effect of the pandemic for longer-term outcomes such as corruption. We look at the historical data on political and economic...
Working Paper
Management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Kerala through the lens of state capacity and clientelism
During the first wave of COVID-19 infections, Kerala, a state in southern India, successfully managed to contain the pandemic. As a result, the Kerala model of managing the COVID-19 pandemic was celebrated as a success across the globe. However, at...
Working Paper
The global inequality boomerang
This paper focuses on the past and potential future evolution of income (or consumption) inequality in the world over the period 1981–2040. Inequality in the world has fallen by most common definitions since the late 1980s, and this is largely due to...