The Intergenerational Mortality Tradeoff of COVID-19 Lockdown Policies / Lin Ma, Gil Shapira, Damien de Walque, Quy-Toan Do, Jed Friedman, Andrei A. Levchenko.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ma, Lin (Assistant professor of economics)

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Shapira, Gil.

Walque, Damien de.

Đõ̂, Quý Toàn.

Friedman, Jed.

Levchenko, Andrei A.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w28925.

NBER working paper series no. w28925

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2021.

Summary:

In lower-income countries, the economic contractions that accompany lockdowns to contain the spread of COVID-19 can increase child mortality, counteracting the mortality reductions achieved by the lockdown. To formalize and quantify this effect, we build a macro-susceptible-infected-recovered model that features heterogeneous agents and a country-group-specific relationship between economic downturns and child mortality, and calibrate it to data for 85 countries across all income levels. We find that in low-income countries, a lockdown can potentially lead to 1.76 children's lives lost due to the economic contraction per COVID-19 fatality averted. The ratio stands at 0.59 and 0.06 in lower-middle and upper-middle income countries, respectively. As a result, in some countries lockdowns can actually produce net increases in mortality. In contrast, the optimal lockdown that maximizes the present value of aggregate social welfare is shorter and milder in poorer countries than in rich ones, and never produces a net mortality increase.

Notes:

Print version record

June 2021.