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Age composition of population and Covid-19The novel Covid-19 is affecting the advanced countries in the Western Hemisphere disproportionately more than developing countries. In this post, Basu...
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Background Note
COVID-19 and socioeconomic impact in AsiaSeveral 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 do we live with corona?People who live through extreme events are, often deeply, altered by the experiences they have. Even when those experiences take place predominantly...
Background Note
COVID-19 and socioeconomic impact in AfricaWhat has the government of South Africa done with respect to COVID-19 measures of mitigation and suppression? The first COVID-19 positive case was confirmed on 5 March 2020. Just ten days later, South Africa had 61 positive cases and President...
Blog
How Africa can fight the pandemic
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...
Blog
Migrant workers in the Covid-19 pandemicMillions of migrant workers around the world provide valuable income for their families and contribute more broadly to the economies of both their...
Blog
The five criteria low income countries must have in place for lockdowns to workAs the COVID-19 virus has spread across the globe, developing countries are starting to enact many of the same policies used in China, Europe, and...
Background Note
COVID-19 and socioeconomic impact in AfricaThe 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...
Blog
An unprecedented threat requires unprecedented leadership: What is needed from global powers
COVID-19 is the greatest global threat the world has faced since the Second World War. It is not the deadliest or most infectious disease recorded...
Working Paper
COVID-19: mortality, future years lost, and demographic structureCOVID-19 causes extremely high mortality among the old. This motivates a comparison of the losses of future lifetime years and future lifetime years of work ensuing from a hypothetical 25,000 excess deaths in Italy, whose affluent population is one of...
Blog
Artificial intelligence vs. COVID-19 in developing countries: Priorities and trade-offs
The rush to harness Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the fight against the pandemic may be an opportunity for developing countries to accelerate the...
Background Note
Artificial intelligence versus COVID-19 in developing countriesIn this note, I will refer to current efforts to harness artificial intelligence (AI) in the push back against COVID-19, note its promises, limitations, potential pitfalls, and identify priorities for developing countries. Artificial Intelligence is...
Technical Note
Deriving shocks to household consumption expenditures from the associated income shocks resulting from COVID-19This note, which forms part of a series of technical notes that complement Lastunen et al. (2021), reports the approach used to derive shocks to household expenditures from shocks at the individual-level labour incomes. Its structure is composed by...
Technical Note
Iterative proportional fitting for reweighting input data in SOUTHMOD microsimulation modelsThis note describes how the counterfactual datasets in the working paper by Lastunen et al. (2021) have been reweighted, for each country analysed, to the ‘pre-crisis’ time point of 31 March 2020. The procedure consists of five main steps. The note...
Blog
Wasted talent – How COVID-19’s effect on the poor could make all of society poorer
The opening keynote of the recent WIDER Development Conference, COVID-19 and development – effects and new realities for the Global South, was given...
Blog
Staffan Lindberg’s keynote address is a wake-up call
In introducing Staffan Lindberg’s keynote at the WIDER Development Conference, UNU-WIDER Senior Research Fellow and political scientist Rachel...
Technical Note
Full-year adjustment for modelling COVID-19 policies in SOUTHMOD tax-benefit microsimulation modelsThis technical note presents a modelling approach used in Lastunen et al. (2021) where tax and benefit policies are scaled to reflect their actual duration during a single calendar year. It can be applied to tax-benefit microsimulation models...
Technical Note
Imputation methods for adjusting SOUTHMOD input data to income losses due to the COVID-19 crisisThis note sets out two different methods on how to adjust incomes in the microdata underlying the standard SOUTHMOD models to reflect a sudden shock, in this case the COVID-19 shock, as done in the accompanying working paper by Lastunen et al. (2021)...
Blog
Working together to better understand how COVID-19 affects poverty and inequalityIn summer 2020 the SOUTHMOD team set out, with partners, to analyse the impact of government policies on protecting households from getting poorer and...
Blog
COVID-19 and the Global South — From crisis response to sustainable development
Around the world, the pandemic, and the measures taken to address it, have had far reaching effects on poverty, inequality, and governance. And even...
Policy Brief
Working Paper
An assessment of the effects of COVID-19 pandemic on Kenya’s tradeWe 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...
Working Paper
COVID-19 in Central America: effects of firm resilience and policy responses on employmentWith data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey, this paper examines how firm-level resilience capabilities interact with government support in the reduction of lay-offs among formal firms in Central America. We estimate two latent variables to...
Journal Article
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the poorWe 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...
Blog
Dr Pia Rattenhuber on inequality in crises — an interviewHow do crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic influence inequality and the other way around? This year’s UN Day Dresden put a spotlight on “Inequalities...
Working Paper
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the poorIn this paper, we examine the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the livelihoods of the poor. We use an unusually rich data set from a ‘financial diaries’ study known as the Hrishipara Daily Diaries Project. The data set tracks the economic...
Working Paper
The livelihood impacts of COVID-19 in urban South AfricaThis paper investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and related policy measures on livelihoods in urban South Africa. Using qualitative research methods, we analyse two rounds of semi-structured phone interviews, conducted between June and...
Blog
What does COVID-19 mean for Africa?: Challenges, but also opportunitiesThe COVID-19 pandemic has led to an exceptional social and economic crisis all over the world, with Africa among the hardest-hit regions. What are the...
Report
How COVID-19 is affecting workers and their livelihoods in urban GhanaThis survey is a collaborative project conducted by researchers of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) and the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER), University of...
Working Paper
Do pandemics lead to rebellion? Policy responses to COVID-19, inequality, and protests in the USAThis paper analyses how inequality across counties in the United States of America has shaped the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the incidence of protests.The empirical analysis combines weekly data between January and December 2020 on levels of...
Working Paper
The gendered crisis: livelihoods and mental well-being in India during COVID-19This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the gendered dimensions of employment and mental health among urban informal-sector workers in India. First, we find that men’s employment declined by 84 percentage points post-pandemic relative...
Blog
Headline data suggests low-income states are coping better with the pandemic than high-income states. But is this true?States with fragile state health systems have been commended for effective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. But if we take into account factors...
Working Paper
COVID-19 and trade facilitation in Southern AfricaCOVID-19 has created a trade crisis in Southern Africa, with a dramatic slowdown in cross-border trade. The crisis, which exposed weaknesses and deficiencies in the trade facilitation regimes, presents an opportunity for the African Continental Free...
Working Paper
Estimates of multidimensional poverty for India using NSSO-71 and -75We measure multidimensional poverty in India using National Sample Survey Organization data from 2014–15 to 2017–18. We use income, health, education, and standard of living to measure the multidimensional poverty index (MPI). The MPI headcount...
Working Paper
The role of automatic stabilizers and emergency tax–benefit policies during the COVID-19 pandemic in EcuadorThis paper makes use of tax–benefit microsimulation techniques to quantify the distributional effects of COVID-19 in Ecuador and the role of tax–benefit policies in mitigating the immediate impact of the economic shocks. Our results show a dramatic...
Working Paper
The role of trust and of poverty in compliance with social distancing measures in Africa during the COVID-19 pandemicSince 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 dataWe 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...
Working Paper
The COVID-19 pandemic and the economy in Southern AfricaThe COVID-19 pandemic has had severe economic consequences in Southern Africa, resulting in an unprecedented decline in production and employment. Similar policy responses have emerged across the region, centred on temporary and inadequate relief for...
Blog
Why countries best placed to handle the pandemic appear to have fared the worstDuring the first year of the pandemic, it was wealthier countries, with their comparatively stronger health systems, civil services, legal systems and...
Blog
Ecuador’s social protection system failed during the pandemic: It needs a rethinkHousehold incomes in Ecuador were badly hit by the pandemic, despite the government’s emergency grant to families. H Xavier Jara Tamayo (University of...
Working Paper
Analysis of the distributional effects of COVID-19 and state-led remedial measures in South AfricaThis paper 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...
Blog
Ghana's lockdown hit vulnerable workers hard: What needs to happen next timeCoronavirus lockdowns brought the world to a standstill. Rules on hygiene and social distancing have reshaped daily life, schools and businesses had...
Working Paper
COVID-19 and the stateWe expect effective state institutions to matter in a country’s ability to respond to crises. Yet notably in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, what has stood out in simple global snapshots is that wealthier countries with stronger institutions...
Working Paper
The impact of COVID-19 on consumption poverty in MozambiqueThis study assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the state of emergency implemented by the Government of Mozambique on household consumption poverty. To predict changes in income and the associated effects on poverty and inequality, we...
Working Paper
The macroeconomic impact of COVID-19 in MozambiqueThis study aims to assess the economic costs of COVID-19 and the state of emergency implemented by the Government of Mozambique, relying on a social accounting matrix. It produces numerical results that represent the direct effect on (or ‘shocks’ to)...
Blog
COVID-19 lays bare Cape Town’s social divide, deepens underlying inequalitiesThe COVID-19 pandemic delivered a devastating economic shock to livelihoods across the world. In Cape Town, it has been toughest on those who had just...
Working Paper
Informal freelancers in the time of COVID-19Despite the severe negative economic shock associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence from many contexts points to a surge in sales on online platforms, as well as shifts in the composition of demand. This paper investigates how the pandemic has...
Blog
South Asia: how to ensure progress on reducing poverty isn't reversed by coronavirusSouth Asia accounted for nearly two-fifths of the world’s poor, nearly half of the world’s malnourished children and was home to the largest number of...
Journal Article
COVID-19 and global povertyThe study paper provides a preliminary assessment of COVID-19’s impact on global poverty in the light of IMF’s growth forecasts. It shows that the pandemic will erode many of the gains recorded over the last decade in terms of poverty reduction. Our...
Blog
The world needs a people’s vaccineThe world needs a people’s vaccine for COVID-19 — one provided universally, and accessible to the entire world population. A patent-protected vaccine...
Working Paper
Do bigger health budgets cushion pandemics?How has government healthcare spending prepared countries for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic? Arguably, spending is the primary policy tool of governments in providing effective health. We argue that the effectiveness of spending in reducing COVID...
Working Paper
Horizontal inequality, COVID-19, and lockdown readinessA growing body of research shows that COVID-19 both reflects and exacerbates existing inequalities. However, there are significant gaps in this research area with respect to ‘horizontal’ or group-based inequalities in Global South countries. Lack of...
Working Paper
The labour market impact of COVID-19 lockdownsIn this paper, we provide causal evidence of the impact of stringent lockdown policies on labour market outcomes at both the extensive and intensive margins, using Ghana as a case study. We take advantage of a specific policy setting, in which strict...
Journal Article
Health-system equity, egalitarian democracy and COVID-19 outcomesThe COVID-19 pandemic has led to a spate of studies showing a close connection between inequitable access to health care, welfare services and adverse outcomes from the pandemic. Others have argued that democratic governments have generally failed...
Blog
Helping the poor to survive lockdownThe Hrishipara Daily Diaries Project has been tracking the daily spending of 60 poor households in rural Bangladesh for the last six years. Analysis...
Blog
Social protection at a crossroad
How can we ensure a resilient and inclusive recovery from COVID-19? How can we hold on to the target of eradicating poverty and hunger by 2030, with...
Journal Article
Data deprivations, data gaps and digital dividesThis study draws lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic for the relationship between data-driven decision making and global development. The lessons are that: (i) users should keep in mind the shifting value of data during a crisis, and the pitfalls its...
Working Paper
The mitigating role of tax and benefit rescue packages for poverty and inequality in Africa amid the COVID-19 pandemicThis paper analyses the distributional effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and related tax-benefit measures in 2020 in a cross-country comparative perspective for five African countries: Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. We first estimate...
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