Exploratory analysis of the regional economic impact of COVID in Argentina

ANDRÉS ALBERTO NIEMBRO; CARLA DANIELA CALÁ

Congreso; YSI Virtual Plenary 2020, Latin America Working Group; 2020

Young Scholars Initiative (YSI)

In this paper, we present an exploratory analysis of the regional economic impact that the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown measures adopted in Argentina could have had during the second quarter of 2020, taking into account both regional and sectoral criteria. To this end, we build an index of territorial economic impact by COVID-19 (ITEI-COVID), which takes into account: a) the regional production structure in terms of formal private employment, b) the operational level of each sector, c) the mobility of workers across regions, and d) the possibility of remote work across different activities. Results show that the regional impact of COVID-19 on private economic activity in Argentina was highly heterogeneous and that these unequal effects were largely related to the degree of productive diversity or the type of regional specialization.