Business disruptions from social distancing

Koren, Miklós; Pető, Rita

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0239113

Cited by 216 publications

(242 citation statements)

References 30 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

216

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The main objective of the initial announcement of 21‐day lockdown followed by its further extension till May 3, has been to ensure social distancing. Social distancing interventions can be effective against fighting the pandemic but are potentially detrimental to the economy (Koren & Pető, 2020). Business and corporate companies that depend heavily on the face to face communications or close physical proximity while producing a product or service are particularly vulnerable.…”

Section: Impact Of Lockdown On Social Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can India stay immune enough to combat COVID ‐19 pandemic? An economic query

Rakshit

Basishtha

2020

J Public Affairs

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected different sectors of the economy in an unprecedented way, and this article is an attempt to analyze the economic effect of the outbreak in India. However, before we assess the economic cost associated with the pandemic, we economists fully consider the outbreak as a human tragedy. There has not been any econometric technique that can account the countless human sufferings that the crisis has brought. Through this article, we address several important research questions and demonstrate India's strength to stay immune to combat COVID-19 pandemic. The research questions are as follows. First, what will be the effect of COVID-19 on the Indian economy and how does it affect the different sectors of the economy? Second, how does the pandemic affect the bilateral trade relation between India and China? Third, we question the role of the public health system in dealing with the outbreak of the virus in India. This article also presents the growth projection of the Indian economy by different economic agents. We finally conclude the article by mentioning a few policy recommendations for the Indian economy. 1 | INTRODUCTION The outbreak of COVID-19, which was initially conceived as a Chinese-centric shock, has now been understood to be a global crisis. With the number of cases increasing rapidly, the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 12, declared COVID-19 as a global pandemic. The unprecedented outbreak of the virus has brought considerable human sufferings to every sphere of human lives. In addition to the public health emergency, the crisis has unpredictably hit the world economy. The operations of the world economy have substantially come to a halt. The economically challenging measures adopted across the countries such as bans on traveling, imposing restrictions on labor mobility, shutting down manufacturing companies, and sharp cutbacks in service sector activities to contain the disease, have produced enormous adverse effects on the economy. However, an accurate empirical assessment about the size and persistence of the pandemic and its likely impact on the world economy is yet unknowable. The earlier pandemics (SARS, Avian Flu, MERS) had affected particularly those countries that were economically less dominant; moreover, the magnitude of the previous pandemics was much smaller than COVID-19. The effect of this virus is, however, economically different. The number of infections is frequently changing on an hourly basis. The top most affected economies out of the outbreak are United States, Italy, China, Spain, France, United Kingdom, and Germany. These economies accidentally happen to be the world's largest economies as well. G7 economies have witnessed exponential growth in the number of confirmed cases. These economies account 60% of the world's demand and supply, 65% of the world's manufacturing, and around 40% of manufacturing exports (Baldwin & di Mauro, 2020). Therefore, there is a saying going around that while these large economies sneeze, the rest of the world will ...

show abstract

Section: Impact Of Lockdown On Social Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can India stay immune enough to combat COVID ‐19 pandemic? An economic query

Rakshit

Basishtha

2020

J Public Affairs

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…2020 ; Coibion et al. 2020 ; Dingel and Neiman 2020 ; Koren and Peto 2020 ). In some sectors, the global supply chain was slowed down or interrupted.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID: Not a Great Equalizer

Galasso

2020

CESifo Economic Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Coronavirus has been portrayed as the ‘great equalizer’. None seems immune to the virus and to the economic consequences of the lockdown measures imposed to contain its diffusion. We exploit novel data from two real-time surveys to study the early impact on the labor market of the lockdown in Italy—one of the two countries, with China, hit hard and early. We find that low-educated workers, blue collars, and low-income service workers were more likely to have stopped working both 3-week and 6-week after the lockdown. Low-educated workers were less likely to work from home. Blue collars worked more from their regular workplace, but not from home. Low-income service workers were instead less likely to work from the regular workplace. For both blue collars and low-income service workers, the monthly labor income dropped already in March. Some positive adjustments took place between the 3rd and the 6th week from the lockdown: the share of idle workers dropped, as the proportion of individuals working at home and from their regular workplace increased. However, these adjustments benefited mostly highly educated workers and white collars. Overall, low-income individuals faced worse labor market outcomes and suffered higher psychological costs. (JEL codes: J21, I24, and H12)

show abstract

“…While social distancing mandates [49], stay-at-home orders [50], and compulsory face mask use [51] are meant to slow the spread of COVID-19, these policies come at a cost of social interactions [52][53][54]. Social distancing mandates limit the size of gatherings [55] and limit consumer traffic for many businesses [56], depressing the number of face-to-face interactions both between workers and between workers and customers.…”

Section: Implications Of the Covid-19 Pandemicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Innovations and Economic Output Scale with Social Interactions in the Workforce

2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 fundamentally changed the way we interact with and engage in commerce. Social distancing and stay-at-home orders leave businesses and cities wondering how future economic activity moves forward. The reduction in face-to-face interactions creates an impetus to understand how social interactivity influences economic efficiency and rates of innovation. Here, we create a measure of the degree to which a workforce engages in social interactions, analyzing its relationships to economic innovation and efficiency. We do this by decomposing U.S. occupations into individual work activities, determining which of those activities are associated with face-to-face interactions. We then re-aggregate the labor forces of U.S. metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) into a metric of urban social interactiveness. Using a novel measure of urbanized area, we then calculate each MSA’s density of social work activities. We find that our metric of urban socialness is positively correlated with a city’s per worker patent production. Furthermore, we use our set of social work activities to reaggregate the workforces of U.S. industries into a metric of industry social interactivness, finding that this measure scales superlinearly with an industry’s per worker GDP. Together, the results suggest that social interaction among workers is an important driver of both a city’s rate of invention and an industry’s economic efficiency. Finally, we briefly highlight analogies between cities and stars and discuss their potential to guide further research, vis-à-vis the density of social interactions “igniting” a city or industry.

show abstract

Business disruptions from social distancing

Cited by 216 publications

References 30 publications

Can India stay immune enough to combat COVID ‐19 pandemic? An economic query

Can India stay immune enough to combat COVID ‐19 pandemic? An economic query

COVID: Not a Great Equalizer

Innovations and Economic Output Scale with Social Interactions in the Workforce

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About