OUR WELFARE AT THE TIME OF COVID-19: EARLY EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT FOR ETHIOPIA

Abstract

Current evidences reveal that COVID-19 will have nontrivial consequences on the global economies. A balanced intervention is expected from policymakers of strong restriction versus the economic and social impacts of the intervention. The main objective here is to quantify the impacts of COVID-19 on welfare through employed propensity score matching and endogenous switching regression methods and using the World Bank high-frequency phone call data in Ethiopia. The results showed that COVID-19 adversely affected all outcomes used here and the impacts vary disproportionally by different household groups. As of now, however, there are no clear indicators that show how these impacts could vary in future. As the pandemic is in its early stage, the condition calls more researches to be conducted with wider datasets that can fully capture the potential and long-term impacts of the pandemic. Finally, this study also sheds light on the effects that COVID-19 has on general welfare in the short-run.

Keywords

• welfare
• covid-19
• food security
• employment
• ethiopia