The intergenerational mortality trade-off of COVID-19 lockdown policies

• Main Authors: MA, Lin, SHAPIRA, Gil, de WALQUE, Damien, DO, Quy-Toan, FIEDMAN, Jed, LEVCHENKO, Andrei A.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: COVID-19; pandemics; lockdown policies; government policies; Behavioral Economics; Health Policy; Public Health
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/2620; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3619&context=soe_research
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In lower-income countries, the economic contractions that accompany lockdowns to contain COVID-19 transmission can increase child mortality, counteracting the mortality reductions achieved by the lockdown. To formalize and quantify this effect, we build a macrosusceptible-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 some low-income countries, a lockdown can produce net increases in mortality. The optimal lockdown that maximizes the present value of aggregate social welfare is shorter and milder in poorer countries than in rich ones.