On the surface, April 2020 was apocalyptic. You could walk the sunny streets of Oxford and barely see a soul: shops closed, roads empty, just the occasional pedestrian nervously crossing to the other side of the street. Of course, it wasn’t just Oxford. The International Labour Organization estimated that, globally, more than 80 per cent of all workers were under some pandemic-related restriction that April.
Behind closed doors, however, the economy was surprisingly resilient. Looking at data from five leading European economies plus the US and Japan, the economists Janice Eberly, Jonathan Haskel and Paul Mizen calculate the extent of that surprise. They find that output from conventional workplaces fell by 23 per cent between the first and second quarters of 2020. Yet actual output fell by just 13 per cent — severe, but less than half of what one might have expected. This was economic resilience in action.
The shocks, however, have kept on coming. So, should we be reassured by the resilience shown in early lockdowns? And is there a way to strengthen it in future?