This book examines economic policies utilized within Southeast Europe in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Covering countries both within and outside the European Union, the human and economic cost of the pandemic is calculated using macroeconomic models from a short and longer term perspective. The economic policies used during the pandemic are analyzed, alongside crisis management approaches, to highlight the effectiveness of monetary policy, fiscal policies and potential future economic solutions for the post COVID-19 period. This book aims to provide policy recommendations based on findings from Southeast Europe. It is relevant to researchers and policymakers involved in economic policy and the political economy, as well as anyone interested in the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A guide to the pandemic economy: essential reading about the long-term implications of our current crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a firehose of information (much of it wrong) and an avalanche of opinions (many of them ill-founded). Most of us are so distracted by the everyday awfulness that we don't see the broader issues in play. In this book, economist Joshua Gans steps back from the short-term chaos to take a clear and systematic look at how economic choices are being made in response to COVID-19. He shows that containing the virus and pausing the economy—without letting businesses fail and people lose their jobs—are the necessary first steps.

Many countries, especially developing ones, follow procyclical fiscal polices, namely spending goes up (taxes go down) in booms and spending goes down (taxes go up) in recessions. We provide an explanation for this suboptimal fiscal policy based upon political distortions and incentives for less-than-benevolent government to appropriate rents. Voters have incentives similar to the "starving the Leviathan" classic argument, and demand more public goods or fewer taxes to prevent governments from appropriating rents when the economy is doing well. We test this argument against more traditional explanations based purely on borrowing constraints, with a reasonable amount of success.

Global value chains (GVCs) have driven dramatic expansions in trade, productivity, and economic growth in developing countries. This book examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on GVCs and explores whether they can continue to be a driver of trade and development. The report reviews previous crises and what these tell us about the resilience of GVC firms to shocks. It examines the observed impact of COVID-19 on trade during the sharp global recession of 2020. It summarizes discussions with GVC firms on the impacts of, and their responses to, the COVID shock. GVCs showed surprising resilience, but the rapid recovery raised new issues with supply chains. The book then explores simulations from a global economic model of the potential longer-term impacts of COVID-19 on developing countries and other key factors shaping the global economy, including the evolving role of China, increasing trade restrictions and policy responses to global warming. The analysis shows that while there are risks associated with GVCs, especially those concentrated around key nodes and where opportunities to find alternative suppliers or buyers are limited, there are mechanisms by which GVCs maintain trade relationships during a crisis, paving the way for a strong trade-led recovery. Measures are identified that can enhance the resilience of GVCs in low-income countries. This report finds that policies that maintain and enhance trade can contribute toward crisis management and recovery. Attempts to reshore production would make all countries worse off, including those that implement them, and could drive 52 million people, mainly in Africa, into extreme poverty. Measures to meet climate change commitments will have more profound impacts, leading to a shift away from carbon-intensive GVCs, while new opportunities for trade will arise in GVCs that are less carbon intensive.

The world's leading economic powers must cooperate more to combat the health and economic shocks resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. In a new free eBook, PIIE Briefing, How the G20 can hasten recovery from COVID-19, Peterson Institute experts outline how collective action by the Group of Twenty (G20) nations can make a difference. The PIIE agenda includes removal of trade barriers impeding the flow of medical supplies and food, and more money for research, testing, and disease control, especially for debt-burdened low-income countries. The World Bank and the World Health Organization need more resources to relieve suffering, and the International Monetary Fund must step up to stabilize the world financial system.

The global health and economic threats from the COVID-19 pandemic are not yet behind us. While the development of multiple safe and highly effective vaccines in less than a year is cause for hope, several significant dangers to recovery of global health and income are still clear and present: New concerning variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, continue to emerge at an alarming rate in different parts of the world; at the same time, vaccine rollouts have been shockingly inefficient even in some rich countries, while much of the developing world waits in line behind them for vaccines to arrive. The Briefing covers several policy areas in which cooperative forward-looking policy action will materially improve our chances of truly escaping today's pandemic and making future pandemics less costly.

Containment measures are crucial to halt the spread of the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic but entail large short-term economic costs. This paper tries to quantify these effects using daily global data on real-time containment measures and indicators of economic activity such as Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) emissions, flights, energy consumption, maritime trade, and mobility indices. Results suggest that containment measures have had, on average, a very large impact on economic activity--equivalent to a loss of about 15 percent in industrial production over a 30-day period following their implementation. Using novel data on fiscal and monetary policy measures used in response to the crisis, we find that these policy measures were effective in mitigating some of these economic costs. We also find that while workplace closures and stay-at-home orders are more effective in curbing infections, they are associated with the largest economic costs. Finally, while easing of containment measures has led to a pickup in economic activity, the effect has been lower (in absolute value) than that from the tightening of measures.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a severe global recession with differential impacts within and across countries. This paper examines the possible persistent effects (scarring) of the pandemic on the economy and the channels through which they may occur. History suggests that deep recessions often leave long-lived scars, particularly to productivity. Importantly, financial instabilities—typically associated with worse scarring—have been largely avoided in the current crisis so far. While medium-term output losses are anticipated to be lower than after the global financial crisis, they are still expected to be substantial. The degree of expected scarring varies across countries, depending on the structure of economies and the size of the policy response. Emerging market and developing economies are expected to suffer more scarring than advanced economies.

Beginning in December 2019, the coronavirus swept quickly through all regions of the world. COVID 19 has wreaked social, political and economic havoc everywhere and has shown few signs of entirely abating. The recent development and approval of new vaccines against the virus, however, now provides some hope that we may be coming to the beginning of the end of the pandemic. This volume collects papers from a conference titled Economic Dimensions of COVID 19 in Indonesia: Responding to the Crisis, organised by the Australian National University’s Indonesia Project and held online 7–10 September 2020. Collectively, the chapters in this volume focus for the most part on the economic elements of COVID 19 in Indonesia. The volume considers both macro- and micro-economic effects across a variety of dimensions, and short- and long-term impacts as well. It constitutes the first comprehensive analysis of Indonesia’s initial response to the crisis from an economic perspective.

The Office for Budget Responsibility was established to provide independent and authoritative analysis of the UK's public finances. Part of this role includes producing the official economic and fiscal forecasts. This report sets out forecasts for the period to 2015-16. The report also assesses whether the Government is on course to meet the medium-term fiscal objectives and presents preliminary observations on the long-run sustainability of the public finances. Since the June forecast, the UK economy has recovered more strongly than initially expected. The GDP growth was greater than expected in both the 2nd and 3rd quarters, but that unemployment levels have risen to levels that the June forecast did not anticipate until the middle of 2012. In general the world economy has also grown more strongly. CPI inflation has remained slightly higher than expected in June, whilst public finances have performed as forecast. The interest rates on UK debt are lower than in June. The OBR forecasts that the economy will continue to recover from the recession, but at a slower pace than the recoveries of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The publication is divided into 5 chapters with two annexes.