Economic policy responses to a pandemic: developing the Covid-19 economic stimulus index

In this project, we conduct a comprehensive review of different economic policy measures adopted by 166 countries as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic and create a large database including fiscal, monetary, and exchange rate measures. Furthermore, using principal component analysis (PCA), we construct a Covid-19 Economic Stimulus Index (CESI) that combines all adopted policy measures. This index standardizes economic responses taken by governments and allows us to study cross-country differences in policies. Finally, using simple cross-country OLS regressions we report that the median age of the population, the number of hospital beds per-capita, GDP per-capita, and the number of total cases are all significantly associated with the extent of countries’ economic policy responses.