Ilan Noy
There is no discernible trade-off between health and GDP outcomes in 2020 (Figure 1). That s one unenviable choice governments were saved from having to make. The economic impact of COVID-19 was highly differentiated, it was not just driven inversely to health outcomes. Early GDP estimates suggest that except for a few fragile states, factors driving GDP in 2020 were the degree to which countries were hit by the global cessation of trade, travel, foreign direct investment, and the degree to which they had the policy space to offset a widespread economic shutdown (Arezki et al. 2021).
Figure 1 Economic decline in the second quarter of 2020 vs rate of confirmed deaths