How Should Policy Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic Differ in the Developing World?

By T. Alon, Minki Kim, David Lagakos, Mitchell VanVuren. 2020

150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper quantitatively analyzes how policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic should differ in developing countries. To do so we build an incomplete-markets macroeconomic model with heterogeneous agents and epidemiological dynamics that features several of the key distinctions between advanced and developing economies germane to the pandemic. We focus in particular on differences in: age structure, fiscal capacity, healthcare capacity, informality, and the frequency of contacts between individuals at home, work, school and other locations. The model predicts that blanket lockdowns are less effective in developing countries, saving fewer lives per unit of lost GDP. In contrast, age-specific policies are even more effective, since they focus scarce public funds on shielding the smaller population of older individuals. School closures are also more effective at saving lives in developing countries, providing a greater reduction in secondary transmissions between children and older adults at home.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Modeling and Simulation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0e79a574f7cd739d4991e8aa5e8a3109aec33011

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Citations in the corpus

This Time It's Different: The Role of Women's Employment in a Pandemic Recession (2020, methodology): “The existing work on this issue (e.g., Alon et al. 2020b) has generally focused on issues other than gender or women’s labor force participation.”
From Mancession to Shecession: Women’s Employment in Regular and Pandemic Recessions (2021, background): “At the onset of the crisis, Alon et al. (2020a) predicted that beyond its cause and magnitude, a key difference between the pandemic recession and others that preceded it would lie in its impact on women’s employment.”
Lives and livelihoods: Estimates of the global mortality and poverty effects of the Covid-19 pandemic (2020, background): “Alon et al. (2020) investigate the differential mortality risks between developed and developing countries using a model in which social welfare is defined as expected lifetime utility.”