The Macroeconomic Impact of COVID-19 on GDP (And Its Components): Evidence from OECD Countries

The world is acquainted with the idea that some parts of it suffer more than others, however year 2020 (and counting) has proven, that it is rather distressing when it happens to the whole world at once. Wars, terrorism, famine, humanitarian crises, climate change – all although terrifying and heinous volatile events, humankind has adapted to receive related new information daily and has developed strategies and action plans how to either overcome it, or how to cope with it. 188 out of 193 countries lacked an action plan when the world had become instantaneously struck by a pandemic. By Jan 2, 2020, 41 people were admitted to the hospital in China with abnormal CT findings on their chests, suffering from a highly contagious disease later named Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, further only as COVID19) (Huang, a iní, 2020). To put it in perspective, to date, 183 529 378 cases were identified worldwide (Our World in Data, 2021). Such an immense number caused more than 183 million people to be socially, economically, medically, or fatally paralyzed from everyday life, resulting in a massive crisis. The above-mentioned scarcity of an action plan for a modern-day pandemic has caused governments mandate to social distance and to ban non-essential business resulted in a shock to both the supply and demand, stock market fluctuations, large scale layoffs, travel bans and many other disruptions to the market, which will be further discussed in this thesis. People being forced to remain sheltered at home, to stop the spread of the virus, subsequently resulted in colossal impacts on multiple sectors. The top five most hit industries include the airline industry, oil & gas drilling, restaurants, auto parts & equipment and the restaurant industry (del Rio-Chanona, Mealy, Pichler, Lafond, & Farmer, 2020).

North Korea, Turkmenistan, Tonga, Tuvalu and Nauru have not reported a single case of COVID19