Abidi Nordine, El Herradi Mehdi, Sakha Sahra
International Monetary Fund, United States of America.
Telecomm Policy. 2023 May;47(4):102522. doi: 10.1016/j.telpol.2023.102522. Epub 2023 Mar 2.
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented shock to firms with adverse consequences for existing productive capacities. At the same time, digitalization has increasingly been touted as a key pathway for mitigating economic losses from the pandemic, and we expect firms facing digital constraints to be less resilient to supply shocks. This paper uses firm-level data to investigate whether digitally-enabled firms have been able to mitigate economic losses arising from the pandemic better than digitally-constrained firms in the Middle East and Central Asia region using a difference-in-differences approach. Controlling for demand conditions, we find that digitally-enabled firms faced a lower decline in sales by about 4 percentage points during the pandemic compared to digitally-constrained firms, suggesting that digitalization acted as a hedge during the pandemic. Against this backdrop, our results suggest that policymakers need to close the digital gap and accelerate firms' digital transformation. This will be essential for economies to bounce back from the pandemic, and build the foundations for future resilience.
新冠疫情给企业带来了前所未有的冲击,对现有生产能力产生了不利影响。与此同时,数字化日益被吹捧为减轻疫情造成的经济损失的关键途径,而且我们预计,面临数字约束的企业应对供应冲击的韧性较差。本文利用企业层面的数据,采用双重差分法,研究在中东和中亚地区,具备数字能力的企业是否比受数字约束的企业能更好地减轻疫情带来的经济损失。在控制需求条件的情况下,我们发现,与受数字约束的企业相比,具备数字能力的企业在疫情期间销售额下降幅度低约4个百分点,这表明数字化在疫情期间起到了缓冲作用。在此背景下,我们的研究结果表明,政策制定者需要缩小数字鸿沟,加速企业的数字化转型。这对于各经济体从疫情中复苏并为未来的韧性奠定基础至关重要。