Estimer l’impact des mesures de restriction sur l’activité

Since the emergence and spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, the indicators developed jointly by the University of Oxford and the Blavatnik School of Government have become indispensable for observers, because they provide a common framework to make a quantitative synthesis of the various restrictions imposed almost everywhere throughout the world. Not only do they capture the intrinsic severity of the various measures implemented, but they also take into account their local or national application, which is not without difficulty for some countries. The synthetic index constructed by the Oxford researchers does a fairly good job of capturing the dispersion of quarterly GDP growth rates over the course of the year 2020. In contrast, an econometric selection of the relevant measures in the course of the modelling shows that school closures and home confinement can alone account for the growth effects of the lockdowns. The other measures do not really provide additional information. It is therefore the measures that block the supply of labor by keeping workers at home, either directly through the prohibition on going out or indirectly through the need to look after children, that appear to hit the functioning of the economy hardest.