NSERC’s One Society Network, in partnership with the JDI, is hosting a series of webinars providing researchers and policymakers an overview of various economic and epidemiology research. During the first event, Queen’s economists will provide an overview of macroeconomic approaches to modeling the impact of COVID under various lockdown and recovery scenarios.

Date: Feb 10^th, 2022 at 2:00 pm MT

Title: On Modelling the Economic Impacts of Policy Responses to Pandemics

(The Zoom link was added to all placeholders in your calendars)

Abstract: This seminar discusses the ongoing need for estimates of the economic costs of pandemics to inform real-time policy choices for Canadian provinces. The complex impacts of COVID-19, and the policy responses to it, present significant challenges to economic modelling. The practical applicability of existing approaches in this context are often limited due to their inflexibility, long-term perspective, lack of regional focus and/or lags in data availability. We provide an overview of a prototype framework, the STUDIO model, designed to address these challenges. We highlight the framework’s key inputs and outputs, as well as its limitations. STUDIO has been applied throughout the COVID-19 pandemic to track its ongoing economic costs and assess the impacts of alternative provincial policy responses to a variety of epidemiological scenarios. We summarize some of the broad implications so far, and the potential costs of alternative scenarios going forward. We also identify areas in which the framework could be improved and extended to expand its applicability to future pandemic modelling.

Presenters: Huw Lloyd-Ellis, PhD. Professor in the Department of Economics, Queen’s University; Frédéric Tremblay, PhD. NSERC and One Society Network Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Economics, Queen’s University.

Huw Lloyd-Ellis conducts academic research in a broad range of areas, including economic development, growth and inequality, economic fluctuations, fiscal policy and housing. His research is regularly published in leading journals. Huw teaches development economics and macroeconomics at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and has taken on several administrative roles at Queen’s, including department head. He is also an Academic Economic Advisor for Limestone Analytics where he has recently worked on projects related to trade and food security in East Africa for USAID, employment impacts of development interventions for the World Bank and the economic impacts of COVID-19 in Ontario.

Frédéric Tremblay recently completed his PhD in Economics at Queen’s University where he researched savings groups as a financial inclusion intervention in international development. In the last year, he also worked on the modelling of the economic impact of COVID-19 and the associated lockdown policies, analysis which has shaped provincial and federal policy. Frédéric also has extensive experience in tax policy modelling and tax expenditures estimation. Before his PhD, he worked as a tax policy officer at Finance Canada and participated in the modelling and design of Canada’s federal carbon price as part of the federal-provincial-territorial Working Group on Carbon Pricing Mechanisms.

Please register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Qd7YttiGS5GW6ZD26lBcfg

Past seminars will be recorded and posted online at onesocietynetwork.ca/training, shortly after the live viewing.