Economic Resilience in the Early Stage of the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Across-Economy Comparison

Abstract

This paper evaluates the economic resilience of 52 economies based on 16 indicators in three dimensions (including the government, enterprises, and the public) and calculates their disaggregate output scores using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method to measure and compare their economic resilience in the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. The evaluation results show that 23 of these economies had no room for further improvement in the overall economic resilience performance at that time. Germany’s economic resilience performance, ranking 24th, is second only to these 23 economies, whereas Australia and Belgium are just behind Germany. These are the better performers among the 52 economies. Meanwhile, this paper also validates the notion that the construction of an economic resilience index is more suitable than the IMD World Competitiveness Index and the WEF Global Competitiveness Index in assessing the economic resilience of those economies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, it is more suitable for the sample countries to refer to the efficiency of each indicator in this article to formulate policy directions and goals, in order to strengthen their economic resilience under the epidemic. However, under the limitations of the COVID-19 epidemic at the time of writing this paper, the economic resilience scores measured in this paper still belong to resistance measures rather than recovery measures.