ACWI - The Impact Of COVID-19 On Global Industrial Production

• My recent research with John Kearns makes a novel contribution by analyzing the impact of pandemic variables on an actual measure of economic activity - industrial production (IP) - across a wide range of economies.
• In all three country groups, but especially the poorest countries, we find that the key factor in the collapse of production last March and April was the imposition of lockdown restrictions.
• In contrast, COVID-19 deaths, which are often interpreted as a proxy for social distancing, accounted for only 19 percent of last spring’s plunge in IP in the richest countries, and had no measurable impact at all in the poorer countries in our sample.

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