Prof Chris Adam & Prof Cameron Hepburn in conversation: "After the lockdown: macroeconomic adjustment to the Covid-19 pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa"

30 July 2020

Portrait of Professor Christopher Adam

with Professor Christopher Adam
 Professor of Development Economics

Christopher Adam's research is on the macroeconomics of low-income countries, in particular those of Africa, with a focus on monetary economics and public finance; and growth and structural change in low-income countries, including in response to cli...

Portrait of Professor Cameron Hepburn

with Professor Cameron Hepburn
 Battcock Professor of Environmental Economics

Cameron Hepburn is co-Director of the Economics of Sustainability Programme, based at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School. He is the Battcock Professor of Environmental Economics at the Smith School of Enterprise and t...

In this talk, Professor Chris Adam, Professor of Development Economics & Oxford Martin Fellow on the Oxford Martin Programme on African Governance, looks beyond the public health aspects of the pandemic to examine the medium-term macroeconomic adjustment challenge confronting domestic policy-makers and international donors.

He will discuss epidemiological and macroeconomic models to calibrate the scale of the combined shock to a representative low-income African economy and to show how alternative policy options for slowing transmission of Covid-19 impact on public revenue, and on GDP in the short run, and hence shape the path to recovery. Noting that the first lockdown, however costly, does not by itself eliminate the likelihood of a re-emergence of the epidemic, he will then lay out the agenda for key macroeconomic and public finance policies to sustain recovery, growth, and poverty reduction in sub-Saharan Africa.

This talk is in partnership with The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford and the Oxford Review of Economic Policy.