QuERI International | The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Future of the Global Economy

(15 January 2021) Based on the original paper by Dr. David L. Blond, Principle Researcher and President, QuERI-International.

In a world where the policy responses to COVID-19 vary from indifference to economic shut-ins for weeks and months at a time, the result is an economic reality that feels akin to wartime disruption. 

The nature of the COVID-19 disruption is utterly unique. Some sectors of the economy are closed down or severely restricted while others are left to work as they see fit. Because of interlinkages between economies, only a modeling system capable of allowing for the interindustry links as well as global linkages to manage some of the impacts and assumptions outside of economic factors can offer the possibility of projecting the economic effects.

Quantitative Economic Research International (QuERI) offers one such model, with a sector specific approach that may be better suited to analyzing the effect of a government induced shutdown and reopening of economies. General adjustment factors in the QuERI model are developed based on the degree of virus and the stage of development to disturb the model’s baseline (December, 2019) result. 

Below we consider the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic through a macroeconomic lens, including adjustments to gross domestic product, private consumption, business investment, government expenditures, exports and imports, as well as financial variables, including prices, exchange rates, and interest rates.