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Comparing Coronavirus Economic and Health Impacts Across Nations
A Simple Multivariate Analysis of the Covid Pandemic
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A few weeks ago, the IMF released its June 2020 world economic outlook and it makes for grim reading. The agency predicts that global gross domestic product (GDP) will decline by 4.9% this year. Should we care? After all, people have long criticized GDP as a terrible metric for the health of a nation. Does a decline in GDP really matter when people are sick and dying?
Luckily we are not limited to analyzing global health based on a single variable, and even economists have caught up to this fact. They now have another metric to track. Like us, IMF staffers probably start every morning by opening dashboards that tally coronavirus infections and deaths. Just as the 2007 financial crisis made everyone amateur economists, this crisis is making us all amateur epidemiologists. And, like a county’s stock market or GDP, coronavirus infection rates can represent the strength and health of a nation.