The COVID-19 green certificates were introduced in many countries in 2021 to encourage vaccine uptake against the COVID-19 virus in order to reduce the spread of severe infection among the population, ensure the safety of cross-border movements, and facilitate the resumption of social life and economic activities. This study uses a single-group interrupted time series approach to examine the effect of the green certificate announcement on the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine in 20 Italian and 18 French regions during the summer of 2021. The estimation results show that the green certificate announcement mitigated regional disparities in vaccine uptake. It persuaded undecided people to have their first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, especially in regions lagging in the mass vaccination campaign. It was less effective in those regions where there was already a high level of vaccine protection. The announcement also proved to be an effective political strategy with which to increase the first-dose rates immediately, but not in the long term.

The World Health Organization proclaimed the global epidemic of obesity more than twenty years ago. However, there has never been a coordinated action to address the problem on the global level. Covid-19 virus pandemic is world's largest public health problem currently. Many comorbidities associated with Covid-19 and obesity mortality are common. We determine that obesity is single largest and most common cause of mortality in Covid-19 patients globally based on a sample of 171 countries, while economic variables have no impact. This creates an opportunity to finally address the obesity global epidemic through an effort coordinated on the global level.

This paper proposes a modelling approach to assess the cross-region and cross-sector economic impacts of the restrictions imposed by governments to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. The nationwide lockdown imposed in Italy during the first wave of the pandemic is used as a benchmark. However, the adopted approach allows an ex-ante assessment of alternative policy responses, in the event of successive pandemic waves, in order to rationalise the policy intervention and reach the best possible compromise between containing the risk of contagion and reducing economic losses. The used approach consists of a non-linear programming model based on a multiregional Input-Output (I-O) table, which guarantees greater flexibility than traditional I-O analysis. It is applied to estimate both direct and indirect losses of GDP and employment produced by alternative policy responses represented by general and differentiated lockdowns. The evidence deriving from the Italian experience shows a sort of learning process through successive waves based on the introduction of increasingly flexible and tailored policy responses to the pandemic.

This paper studies an age-based lockdown that keeps over-60 workers at home as policy response to COVID-19 pandemic in a sample of thirty countries of the European single market. Three main policy issues are addressed, and the results can be summarized as follows. First, age-based lockdown policies are associated with limited output losses and, therefore, are an efficient strategy to limit the spread of the virus in a pandemic, especially in presence of strong age-dependent fatality rates. Second, lockdown policies generate substantial spillover effects; hence, international policy coordination avoiding that too many countries are in lockdown contemporaneously or that such coordination takes place across the countries with the highest integration of over-60 workers along GVCs may be helpful in reducing disruptions. Third, non-targeted lockdowns are much more costly than age-based ones; therefore, other things equal, age-based policies should always be preferred to non-targeted ones. Our analysis also suggests that, in our sample, the over-60 workers are relatively more numerous in sectors where the value added and the integration in GVCs is lower; this feature should be kept in mind in the design of other policies as it might play an important role.

The present study examines covariates of food security and the impact of Covid-19 induced shocks, among households in India using a nationally representative survey. Using a 2SLS panel regression model, we find an important role of incomes, relative food prices, household characteristics, as well as mobility restrictions in response to the rising number of infections in a given region in explaining varying food expenditure shares prior to and during the Covid-19 pandemic. The disproportionate burden of the pandemic induced lockdowns on the disadvantaged and minorities calls for effective action on the part of policymakers to boost aggregate demand, fix supply chains and reduce food price volatility.

Agriculture is under transformation in sub-Saharan Africa where millions still do not have access to a healthy diet. Policy makers in this region should find ways to accelerate agricultural transformation while increasing access to healthy diets. Optimizing agriculture's public budget stands out as a handy option. By combining a dynamic computable general equilibrium model and a multi-criteria decision-making technique, and applying them in the context of Ethiopia, this paper points to an important trade-off that policy makers should keep in mind. An optimal allocation of agriculture's public budget aimed at increasing agri-food output, creating off-farm jobs and reducing rural poverty, which are agricultural transformation objectives, will help to reduce the cost of a healthy diet, allowing around 2 million more Ethiopians to afford it. This number could even be higher should policy makers allocate the budget optimally aiming at only lowering the cost of a healthy diet, but at the cost of reducing household income and slowing down transformation.

Several scholars have focused on the COVID-19 case studies in Europe and USA, leaving the people in Southeast Asia with little information about the lesson learned from their own case studies. This study aims to analyses case studies through the SEIR model in three Southeast Asia countries including Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The SEIR model incorporates two types measures including social behavior and lockdowns as well as hospital preparedness. The SEIR model reveals that Malaysia, despite its relatively low testing capacity but with the application of the national lockdown, can slash the coronavirus transmission while Indonesia has still struggled to contain the COVID-19 flow owing to partial lockdowns. Singapore, at one hand, can successfully contain the coronavirus due to the national lockdowns, and the better healthcare system. With this point in mind, it is not surprising that Singapore has very low fatality rates and significantly low cases after lockdowns. Better preparedness lockdowns, and sufficient testing capacity are keys to controlling the COVID-19 flow, especially if the development of vaccines or distribution of respective vaccines is under progress.

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed countries to adopt various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Due to the features of the pandemic, which spread over time and space, governments could decide whether or not to follow policy choices made by leaders of countries affected by the virus before them. In this study, we aim to empirically model the adoption of NPIs during the first wave of COVID-19 in the 14 European countries with more than 10 million inhabitants, in order to detect whether a policy diffusion mechanism occurred. By means of a multivariate approach based on Principal Component Analysis and Cluster Analysis, we manage to derive three clusters representing different behaviour models to which the different European countries belong in the different periods of the first wave: pre-pandemic, summer relaxation and deep-lockdown scenarios. These results bring a two-fold contribution: on the one hand, they may help us to understand differences and similarities among European countries during the first wave of the COVID-19 outbreak and guide future quantitative or qualitative studies; on the other, our findings suggest that with minor exceptions (such as Sweden and Poland), different countries adopted very similar policy strategies, which are likely to be due more to the unfolding of the pandemic than to specific governmental strategies.

This article documents recent developments in emerging markets in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, assesses their prospects and challenges, and discusses appropriate policy settings for the medium term. It argues that EM policymakers' ability to grapple with an incomplete and uneven recovery will be constrained by high public debt and uncertain inflation prospects as well as external risks surrounding capital flows and exchange rate developments. The paper also discusses potential impact of a tightening in global financial conditions and appreciation of the US dollar that could be triggered by a general increase in risk aversion or a reassessment of the likely path of US monetary policy.

This paper evaluates the economic impact of discretionary fiscal and monetary actions taken in the United States during 2020 and 2021. The fiscal actions are The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or the "CARES" Act, passed in March 2020; The Consolidated Appropriations Act, passed in December 2020; and The American Rescue Plan Act, passed in March 2021. The paper focuses on the impact of the "economic impact payments" that underlie these fiscal actions. The paper also examines discretionary monetary policy actions taken during the same period. The overall implication is that there is a need to return to policies that increase economic growth and stability, including rules-based fiscal and monetary policy, rather than to continue with these one-time discretionary actions.

This paper examines how government support interacts with firm-level resilience capabilities in the reduction of layoffs among formal firms in Central America. Our analysis suggests that government support measures play a role in reducing the probability of layoffs among firms with dynamic resilience capabilities (i.e., those that are developed the pandemic onset). The effect of government support is not statistically different from the effect of static resilience capabilities alone (i.e., those that were present before the pandemic); thus, in firms with such capabilities, the effect of government support will be marginal. These results hold across sectors - exhibiting a marginally higher treatment effect in service sectors. Our results do not imply that Covid-19 supportive measures are to be disregarded, but instead raise the question of how government support policies could improve the allocation of support among firms in times of crises. Moreover, it underlines the necessity of policies that enhance resilience more broadly - a task that hints at structural issues and requires continuous government support in lieu of ad-hoc measures.

Many countries have imposed a set of non-pharmaceutical health policy interventions in an effort to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The objective of this paper is to examine the effects of the interventions, drawing on evidence from the OECD countries. A special feature here is the mechanism that underlies the impact of the containment policies. To this end, a causal mediation analysis decomposing the total effect into a direct and an indirect effect is conducted. The key finding is a dual cause-effect channel. On the one hand, there is a direct effect of the non-pharmaceutical interventions on the various health variables. Beyond this, a quantitatively dominant indirect impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions operating via voluntary changes in social distancing is shown.

I analyze the human life-economic loss dilemma (HELD) trade-off between saving lives ad saving economic activities during the emergency period of Covid 19 pandemic. A new concept labeled HELD Curve, not addressed in the literature so far, is proposed to model the inverse non-linear relation between loss of economic activity and death rates during the Covid 19 Pandemic in Europe, due to the lockdown policy. Econometric estimation supports this view offering to policymakers a tool to assess the impact of continuing the lockdown. The HELD curve elasticity implies a trade-off of 218 thousand EURO per saved human life.

On 3 June 2020, the German government announced a EUR 130 billion fiscal stimulus package to stimulate market demand and jumpstart the economy in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in the spring of 2020. The most prominent measure of this package is an unconventional fiscal policy in the form of a temporary VAT rates cut for six months, from 1 July to 31 December 2020. Employing a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) framework, we study the efficiency of the VAT tax rates cut for ameliorating the consequences of the pandemic recession. The simulation of the calibrated DSGE model yields a tax policy-induced real GDP increase of about 0.3% points for 2020.

In this article , we show that the result that the PIIGS group had the largest negative unadjusted and abnormal returns on the day following the Brexit Referendum is robust to taking into account jointly other extreme events such as the Covid-19. , we provide evidence that the impact of the declaration of Covid-19 to be a global pandemic by the WHO - when global markets fell by nearly 15% - had a total different reaction in the financial markets to the one following the Brexit Referendum, impacting more negatively in countries where quarantine lockdowns were announced that day (i.e. Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Italy and Spain), independently on their debt-to GDP ratio. We also show that the day after Covid-19 was declared as a global pandemic, China and Japan (countries that already implemented lockdowns in the previous months) were the only analyzed countries that did not experience any evidence of abnormal returns in their financial markets. Moreover, during the three following days, the US was the only analyzed country showing no evidence of negative abnormal returns due to the declaration of the national emergency. These results suggest that government policies must take into account and monitor specially health-related news at global level, since they can have enormous impacts on portfolio allocations on stock markets, in order to take more informed decisions.

Poor quality of care may have a detrimental effect on access and take-up and can become a serious barrier to the universality of health services. This consideration is of particular interest in view of the fact that health systems in many countries must address a growing public-sector deficit and respond to increasing pressures due to COVID-19 and aging population, among other factors. In line with a rapidly emerging literature, we focus on patient satisfaction as a proxy for quality of health care. Drawing on rich longitudinal and cross-sectional data for Spain and multilevel estimation techniques, we show that in addition to individual level differences, policy levers (such as public health spending and the patient-doctor ratio, in particular) exert a considerable influence on the quality of a health care system. Our results suggest that policymakers seeking to enhance the quality of care should be cautious when compromising the level of health resources, and in particular, health personnel, as a response to economic downturns in a sector that traditionally had insufficient human resources in many countries, which have become even more evident in the light of the current health crisis. Additionally, we provide evidence that the increasing reliance on the private health sector may be indicative of inefficiencies in the public system and/or the existence of features of private insurance which are deemed important by patients.

The uneven economic recovery from the pandemic-induced global recession of 2020 is expected to disrupt a multi-decade trend of per capita income convergence between advanced and emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). This stands in contrast to the global recession following the global financial crisis. Should downside risks to the global recovery, in particular financial market stress, materialize, they are likely to set back growth in EMDEs more than in advanced economies in part because of the more limited policy space remaining in EMDEs, and would further widen per capita income divergence.

Risk management institutions can be reinvented in the 21st century in response to the changing nature of economic uncertainties and changing information technology. The COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on the economy provide an example of new kinds of uncertainties to be managed. National and international contracts should manage risks to claims on better-defined economic aggregates and prices of factors of human capital to make for better economic measurements and better risk management opportunities. The failures of international management of the COVID-19 pandemic, including failure to control the spread of misinformation, provide lessons for such new financial arrangements.