This research used the Standard GTAP model and the GTAP9a Database to estimate the economic impact of the COVID-19 which began in Wuhan, China on December 30, 2019 on Korea and major countries. The virus was declared “pandemic” by the World Health...
This research used the Standard GTAP model and the GTAP9a Database to estimate the economic impact of the COVID-19 which began in Wuhan, China on December 30, 2019 on Korea and major countries. The virus was declared “pandemic” by the World Health Organization (WHO) at March 11, 2020, and spread to more than 200 countries in less than a year. As of the first half of 2021, there is still no sign of an end of the pandemic and economic damage to the world and regions continues to accumulate. Various COVID-19-related economic studies have been conducted, but early prior studies tend to underestimate the economic impact of COVID-19, because they did not anticipate a prolonged situation or focused on China, the start place of outbreak. In addition, many changes occurred compared to the initial situation, such as increasing the severity, continuous spread and vaccine development, and so this study quantitatively estimated and analyzed the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Korea and major economies in 2021.
The Standard GTAP model is a multiregion, multisector, computable equilibrium model and suitable for estimating the before and after effects of exogenous shocks such as COVID-19, and the GTAP database is an international data base for using GTAP model. This research re-categorized the data into 6 regions and 10 industries, and set the degree of economic shock in three stages by considering a prior study on COVID-19 and the economic prospect report published by the Bank of Korea in 2021. There are three exogenous economic shocks, ‘decrease in labor supply’, ‘increasing international tourism service export taxes’ and ‘decrease in demand for tourism-related industries’.
Results show that GDP, income, output, import and export have all decreased across the region, and that more severe the economic shock, the greater the damage. In particular, drops in the private households’ expenditure, import and export values are the biggest, and drops in them for the international tourism services industry are especially big. The value of international transport services decreased by an average of 3.66% in all regions, import and export values of the tourism-related sector, ‘TnspCm(Transport and Communication)’, decreased by 28.37% on average, and the private household expenditure on imports of ‘TnspCm’ decreased by 33.45% on average. Other indicators, such as firms’ expenditure and output, also declined, while government expenditure has been shown to increase due to the economic downturn caused by COVID-19. Overall, the estimates show similar aspects, but differences exist depending on region and industry structural characteristics.
This study conducted the quantitative analysis of the economic impact of COVID-19 on Korea and major countries, and it is meaningful that the country-specific research was conducted by reflecting changes and setting exogenous shocks differently by regions. However, in this study, there are limitations that do not consider financial aspects such as capital flows and that the data used are based on 2011. Nevertheless, this paper can be used as a prior study related to infectious diseases, in the future. Also, more accurate studies can be conducted, by modifying and expanding the model or by setting multiple scenarios.