In this article, they look at 23 rich countries and determine which countries have done the best/worse during the pandemic using 5 measures. The measure that they studied were GDP, Household Incomes, Stockmarket performance, Capital spending, and Government indebtedness. They found that the speed of the bounceback is surprisingly fast and has shocked many economic forecasters. The average unemployment across the 23 countries was 5.7%, and the aggregate household income was above the pre-covid level. Although the majority of the countries are better than before the pandemic there are definitely uneven effects of the pandemic across countries, and some have not performed as well. Britain, Germany, Italy, and Spain are among some of the struggling countries. The struggles of these countries have been caused by travel bands in the countries that rely heavily on tourism, high levels of death that led to low consumer spending, and not preserving jobs nor compensating the losers. Other countries that have performed better during the pandemic strategies were to make up for the people's lost labor income by sending them vast amounts of money in the form of topped-up unemployment benefits and stimulus checks. Also when they looked at the companies' performances during the pandemic they used the stock market performance as an indicator and found that companies were not nearly as affected as households. Capital spending during the pandemic has increased in some countries with entrepreneurs looking at the opportunities created by the pandemic and other companies spending big money for technologies to make working from home more efficient. The last measure that they looked at was public indebtedness and found that the OECD predicts that the combined GDP of the three highest-ranked covid performing countries to be 5% higher than their pre-pandemic level and output for the wort performers is expected to only be 1% higher than pre-pandemic levels. They have concluded that across the countries that they have studied there is uneven effects of the pandemic, and these will continue to affect the lower-performing countries for more time to come.
I really like the article that you chose to talk about. It is interesting to hear about countries that have struggled more or less than others since the pandemic. I would like to add that the countries that have been failing the most have also had tighter covid restrictions like lockdowns and vaccine mandates. These actions have caused people to leave the labor force over their choice of vaccination as well as lockdowns contributing to many small businesses being ran out of business.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the article you chose greatly! However, I wonder if those five factors are enough to really measure the performance of a country. For instance, participation in the labor force is an extremely big factor in a country's economy bouncing back. Another might be the relative inflation in a given economy or the purchasing power of their currency.
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