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Economic policy responses to a pandemic: developing the Covid-19 economic stimulus index

In this project, we conduct a comprehensive review of different economic policy measures adopted by 166 countries as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic and create a large database including fiscal, monetary, and exchange rate measures. Furthermore, using principal component analysis (PCA), we construct a Covid-19 Economic Stimulus Index (CESI) that combines all adopted policy measures. This index standardizes economic responses taken by governments and allows us to study cross-country differences in policies. Finally, using simple cross-country OLS regressions we report that the median age of the population, the number of hospital beds per-capita, GDP per-capita, and the number of total cases are all significantly associated with the extent of countries’ economic policy responses.

Lead investigator:

Ceyhun Elgin

Affiliation:

Bogazici University

Primary topic:

Attitudes, media & governance

Secondary topic:

Prices & interest rates

Region of data collection:

World

Status of data collection

Complete

Type of data being collected:

Publicly available

Unit of real-time data collection

Country

Start date

2/2020

End date

6/2020

Frequency

Bi-weekly

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