Tracking the economic impact of India’s second covid wave
Lights, power, inaction
Rivers change course, forests catch flame, glaciers melt: Raj Bhagat Palanichamy of the World Resources Institute India, a research centre, has tracked all of these injuries to India’s landscape through satellite images. In the past year, he has been trying to map a different kind of harm, identifying infection hotspots, pinpointing hospital beds and cross-checking official fatality numbers by examining infrared images of the fires at crematoria.
The murderous toll of India’s second wave of covid-19 infections is impossible to miss but hard to measure. The same is true of its toll on the economy. gdp data for April to June will not be released until the end of August. Figures for industrial production in April will not appear until mid-June and will anyway miss the service sector, which is likely to be hardest hit. India’s government publishes a “periodic” survey of the labour force. But Himalayan glaciers could shrink in the time it takes for it to appear. Hence the keen interest in less conventional indicators of economic activity, such as electricity consumption, mobile-phone data and views from space.
Why the economic value of a face mask is $56.14
A new frontier in facial finance
Finance & economicsAug 22nd 2020 edition
Aug 22nd 2020
Editor’s note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hub
After a brutal first six months of the year, governments across the world are hoping for an economic bounce-back. Rich-world gdp fell by about 10% in the first half of 2020. Yet much has changed since—including that more people are now wearing masks. Economists, obsessed with translating everything into gdp, wonder if more widespread face-covering could help the recovery.
The thinking goes that masks can, in part, substitute for lockdowns. People wearing them need not be discouraged as much from using public transport. More shops and offices might be able to reopen, albeit while practising social distancing.
Calculations from Goldman Sachs, a bank, suggest that a 15 percentage-point rise in the share of the population that wears masks would reduce the daily growth of cases by about one percentage point. That obviates the need for lockdown measures that would otherwise subtract nearly 5% from gdp. The Economist took those calculations a step further. According to our reckoning, an American wearing a mask for a day is helping prevent a fall in gdp of $56.14. Not bad for something that you can buy for about 50 cents apiece.
These economic benefits suggest that governments should do even more to nudge the minority of people who still forgo masks. English shoppers without a face-covering risk a fine of £100-3,200 ($130-4,200). Authorities in Turkey and Tuscany have handed out free ones to citizens. Perhaps governments should do more—such as pay people to wear them. After all, the large economic benefits of doing so have finally been unmasked.
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This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline "Cloth of gold"
The more people adopt mask-wearing, the more likely that lockdown measures are avoided, and costly falls in GDP averted
ECONOMIST.COM
Why the economic value of a face mask is $56.14
When you put it that way
