Social Policy & Administration

Socioeconomic impact due to COVID-19: An empirical assessment

Socioeconomic impact due to COVID-19: An empirical assessment

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, this paper presents a then and now analysis of the India economy using a socioeconomic framework focusing on different factors — unemployment, industrial production, import-export trade, equity markets, currency exchange rate, and gold and silver prices.

Authors

Rameshwar Arora, Assistant Professor, Jindal Global Business School, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India.

Vedika Gupta, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Bharati Vidyapeeth’s College of Engineering, Delhi, India.

KC Santosh, Pattern Analysis & Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Research Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of South Dakota, USA.

Tiziana Ciano, Faculty of Business and Law, University of Portsmouth, Richmond Building, Portland Street, Portsmouth, United Kingdom of Great Britain.

Khairul Shafee Kalid, Positive Computing Research Cluster, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Bandar Seri Iskandar, Perak, Malaysia.

Senthilkumar Mohan, School of Information Technology and Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India.

Summary

Starting from December 2019, the novel COVID-19 threatens human lives and economies across the world. It was a matter of grave concern for the governments of all the countries as the deadly virus started expanding its paws over neighboring regions of infected areas. The spread got uncontrollable, thereby leaving no choice for the nations but to impose and observe nationwide lockdown. The lockdown further sorely hit many sectors, which in turn impacted the economy.

Manufacturing, agriculture, and the service sector – the three pillars of the economy – have been adversely affected giving a major slow down to the economy belonging to every nation.

Several schemes and policies were introduced by different state and central governments to absorb the impact of subsequent lockdowns on individuals. In this paper, we present a then and now analysis of the economy using a socioeconomic framework focusing on factors- unemployment, industrial production, import-export trade, equity markets, currency exchange rate, and gold and silver prices.

For all these, we consider India as a case study because the Indian sub-continent has a wide landscape and rich cultural heritage presenting itself as a potential hub for economic activities.

A thorough assessment has been made for the period January 2020- June 2020. The assessment will be beneficial to observe the long-term impact of any infectious disease outbreak such as COVID-19 locally and globally.

Published in: Information Processing & Management

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