Escuela de Gobierno, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Región Metropolitana, Chile.
Centre for Sustainable Urban Development (CEDEUS), Chile.
J Glob Health. 2021 Jan 16;11:05002. doi: 10.7189/jogh.10.05002.
Governments worldwide have implemented large-scale non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as social distancing or school closures, to prevent and control the growth of the COVID-19 pandemic. These strategies, implemented with varying stringency, have imposed substantial social and economic costs to society. As some countries begin to reopen and ease mobility restrictions, lockdowns in smaller geographic areas are increasingly considered an attractive policy intervention to mitigate societal costs while controlling epidemic growth. Nevertheless, there is a lack of empirical evidence to support these decisions.
Drawing from a rich data set of localized lockdowns in Chile, we used econometric methods to measure the reduction in local economic activity from lockdowns when applied to smaller or larger geographical areas. We measured economic activity by tax collection at the municipality-level.
Our results show that lockdowns were associated with a 10%-15% drop in local economic activity, which is twice the reduction in local economic activity suffered by municipalities that were not under lockdown. A three-to-four-month lockdown had a similar effect on economic activity than a year of the 2009 great recession. We found costs are proportional to the population under lockdown, without differences when lockdowns were measured at the municipality or city-wide levels.
Our findings suggest that localized lockdowns have a large effect on local economic activity, but these effects are proportional to the population under lockdown. Our results suggest that epidemiological criteria should guide decisions about the optimal size of lockdown areas since the proportional impact of lockdowns on the economy seems to be unchanged by scale.
全球各国政府已实施大规模非药物干预措施，如社交距离或学校停课，以预防和控制 COVID-19 大流行的蔓延。这些策略的实施力度各不相同，给社会带来了巨大的社会和经济成本。随着一些国家开始重新开放并放宽流动限制，在较小地理区域实施封锁越来越被认为是一种有吸引力的政策干预措施，可以在控制疫情蔓延的同时减轻社会成本。然而，缺乏支持这些决策的经验证据。
利用智利局部封锁的丰富数据集，我们使用计量经济学方法来衡量封锁在较小或较大地理区域实施时对当地经济活动的减少。我们通过市级税收来衡量经济活动。
我们的研究结果表明，封锁与当地经济活动下降 10%-15%相关，这是未受封锁影响的市级经济活动下降幅度的两倍。为期三到四个月的封锁对经济活动的影响与 2009 年大衰退期间一年的影响相当。我们发现成本与封锁下的人口成正比，而在以市级或全市范围衡量封锁时没有差异。
我们的研究结果表明，局部封锁对当地经济活动有很大影响，但这些影响与封锁下的人口成正比。我们的研究结果表明，流行病学标准应指导关于封锁区域最佳规模的决策，因为封锁对经济的影响比例似乎不受规模的影响。
