"The Fiscal Response to COVID-19. A Political Economy"
This week in SPARC - Thursday 28th April - we will have our ex-colleague Amilcar Moreira, who will present the following paper:
The Fiscal Response to COVID-19. A Political Economy.
Amílcar Moreira (SOCIUS - Research Centre in Economic and Organizational Sociology)
Daniel Béland (McGill University)
Bent Greve (RUC)
Abstract
In March 2020, the WHO declared COVID-19 as a global pandemic. As it spread across the globe, the pandemic infected millions and left a death toll that, by April 2022, already exceeds 6 million. The impact of the pandemic on the most affected countries was also sizeable (see IMF, 2021a). The scale of the health and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted policymakers, especially those in the most advanced economies, to put forward a large fiscal response (see Béland et al, 2021).
However, evidence on the stimulus packages put forward by governments during this period (see IMF, 2021b; ECB, 2021) suggests that there was significant variation in the size of the fiscal response across countries. Using the size of (cyclically adjusted) primary government balance as a measure of the size of the (discretionary) fiscal response, this paper aims to explore the reasons that explain cross-country differences in the fiscal response to COVID-19 in advanced and middle-income economies. In particular, the paper will look at how the incidence and severity of the pandemic, the fiscal space available to policy makers, and the political orientation of the incumbent, influence the size of the fiscal response to COVID-19.
The session will be hybrid in Sala 1, as usual from 14h30-16h00.
The zoom link is the following:
