Date: 18 Aug 2022 (Thu)
Webinar
Webinar Series:
Capital Market Development: China and Asia
- The Economic Cost of Locking down like China: Evidence from City-To-City Truck Flows
18 Aug 2022, Thursday
10:00 am – 11:10 am, Thursday (Hong Kong Time, UTC+8)
[ The Economic Cost of Locking down like China: Evidence from City-To-City Truck Flows ]
Containing the COVID-19 pandemic by non-pharmacological interventions is costly. Using high-frequency, city-to-city truck flow data, this paper estimates the economic cost of lockdown in China, a stringent but effective policy. By comparing the truck flow change in the cities with and without lockdown, the authors find that a one-month full-scale lockdown causally reduces the truck flows connected to the locked down city in the month by 54%, implying a decline of city’s real income with the same proportion in a gravity model of city-to-city trade. The authors also structurally estimate the cost of lockdown in the gravity model, where the effects of lockdown can spill over to other cities through trade linkages. Imposing full-scale lockdown on four largest cities for one month would reduce the national real GDP by 8.6%, of which 11% is contributed by the spillover effects.
Speaker
Michael SONG, Professor, Department of Economics, Chinese University of Hong Kong and Senior Fellow, ABFER
Co-authors:
Jingjing CHEN, PhD Student, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University
Wei CHEN, Assistant Professor, School of Economics, Zhejiang University
Ernest LIU, Assistant Professor of Economics, Princeton University
Jie LUO, Assistant Professor, School of International Trade and Economics, University of International Business and Economics
Discussant:
Elisa GIANNONE, Assistant Professor of Economics, The Pennsylvania State University
-----------
Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_NUJGoCBcQa2HgS1IJRBcfQ
-----------
Event Website
https://abfer.org/events/abfer-events/webinar-series/314:webinarseries-cmd-20
-----------
About the Webinar
Financial market development goes hand-in-hand with economic growth. The development of China's capital markets in terms of size, regulations, capability, and efficiency has been impressive. China may now even lead globally in some dimensions, notably e-payments systems. Yet, China's capital markets are still a work-in-progress facing both generic and unique challenges. Other Asian capital markets have even greater uneven development. Some in advanced Asian economies have acquired globally acclaimed reputation and capabilities while various regulatory and structural weaknesses dwarf others. Corporations and investors have been inclined to arbitrage cross-border regulatory and developmental gaps; so the very uneven status of capital markets across Asia is a policy issue for the governments in the entire region and perhaps globally. Analysing the positive and negative lessons in the functioning of Asia's capital markets, and identifying reforms and applications of technology that could further improve Asian capital markets' allocation efficiency, financial inclusion, and forewarning against reforms that might cause problems can benefit practitioners, policymakers and researchers, and can contribute significantly to overall prosperity.
The ABFER and the University of Chicago's Becker Friedman Institute China (BFI-China), in collaboration with National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School, Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance (SAIF), The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Department of Economics, CUHK-Shenzhen and Tsinghua University PBC School of Finance (Tsinghua PBCSF), hope to provide a virtual network to benefit researchers, policymakers, and practitioners from Asia and beyond.