As part of the Joint webinar series organised by the Department of International Economics and the CEPR,  we are pleased to invite you to an online public talk by Professor Titan Alon. He will present his paper

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

coauthored with Minki Kim, David Lagakos and Mitchell VanVuren.

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Abstract:The COVID-19 pandemic has already led to dramatic policy responses in most advanced economies, and in particular sustained lockdowns matched with sizable transfers to much of the workforce. This paper provides a preliminary quantitative analysis of how aggregate policy responses should differ in developing countries. To do so we build an incomplete-markets macroeconomic model with epidemiological dynamics that features several of the main economic and demographic distinctions between advanced and developing economies relevant for the pandemic. We focus in particular on differences in population structure, fiscal capacity, healthcare capacity, the prevalence of ``hand-to-mouth'' households, and the size of the informal sector. The model predicts that blanket lockdowns are generally less effective in developing countries at reducing the welfare costs of the pandemic, saving fewer lives per unit of lost GDP. Age-specific lockdown policies, on the other hand, may be even more potent in developing countries, saving more lives per unit of lost output than in advanced economies.