Coronavirus

Between October 2020 and May 2021, the Middle East Initiative conducted a series of nationally representative surveys to measure the economic, social, and public health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.1 Designed and supervised by Tarek Masoud, Faculty Director of the Middle East Initiative, and Yuree Noh, Research Fellow, the surveys collected responses from 8,500 residents of seven countries in the region—Algeria, Egypt, Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates. Our goal is to provide the data and insights needed to develop effective policy responses to current and future public health crises.

This report summarizes our findings on how COVID-19 has disrupted employment, mental health, food security, education, and childcare in the region during its first year. We also show that the consequences of the pandemic were felt most acutely by some of the region’s most vulnerable populations: the poor, women, youth, and children.

Stephen Walt argues that the true value of more diverse decision-making teams and more open political systems is not that they never make mistakes but rather that they make it more likely that policy blunders will be corrected once it is clear they are not working.

US media often report that a particular policy is generally considered bad or unpopular when in reality it seeks to achieve a reasonable trade-off between competing forces or goals. There have been three recent examples of this practice that highlight the problem.

The Covid-19 pandemic has drastically disrupted people’s lives, livelihoods, and economic conditions around the world. The global shock has resulted in a tourism standstill (Djankov 2020), significant capital flight (Djankov and Panizza 2020), and a slowdown in remittances (Nonvide 2020), resulting in an urgent balance-of-payments need. Egypt responded to the crisis with a comprehensive package aimed at tackling the health emergency and supporting economic activity. The Ministry of Finance acted swiftly to allocate resources to the health sector, provide targeted support to the most severely impacted sectors, and expand social safety net programmes to protect the most vulnerable. Similarly, the Central Bank of Egypt adopted a broad set of measures, including lowering the policy rate and postponing repayments of existing credit facilities. The next section highlights the experience of firms in Egypt following these policies.

On 8 June, the business cycle dating committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research declared that economic activity in the US had peaked in February 2020, formally marking the start of a recession. But we already knew that we were in a recession that had likely begun around that date. So, why does the NBER’s formal declaration matter?

It is no secret that measures of employment fell sharply from February to March. Real (inflation-adjusted) personal consumption expenditure (PCE) and real personal income before transfers both peaked in February as well. Official measures of GDP are released only quarterly but the economic free-fall in late March was enough to pull first-quarter GDP growth down to an annualized rate of -4.8% (relative to the last quarter of 2019).

Jason Furman speaks with NPR about his theory that the economy could be a winner for Republicans this fall. 

Juergen Braunstein and Sachin Silva argue that sovereign wealth funds may be central to governments' efforts to balance public responsibility with private interests in post-pandemic economies.

Former Foreign Minister Yoon Young-Kwan and Joseph Nye, professor emeritus at Harvard Kennedy School, discuss COVID-19 challenges at a forum hosted by the Korean Foundation and Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and broadcast live on YouTube on Wednesday.

The Covid-19 recession started with a sudden shuttering of many businesses, a nationwide decline in consumption and massive increase in unemployment. But starting around April 15, when economic reopening started to spread but the overall numbers still looked grim, Furman noticed some data that pointed to the kind of recovery that economists often see after a hurricane or industrywide catastrophe like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The World Bank named Harvard University professor Carmen Reinhart as its chief economist, tapping an expert in the history of debt and financial crises as the global economy suffers its deepest downturn since the Great Depression.