Health burdens amid COVID-19 pandemic: A stark barrier to labor productivity in Africa

Abstract

The author analyzes the effects of health burdens on labour productivity amid the Covid-19 pandemic in Africa. He employed Common Correlated Effects (CCE) estimation of Heterogeneous Dynamic Panel data Model to estimate a sample of 45 African countries from 1990 to 2020. Our result shows that health burden exact dynamic negative long-term spilling effect on labour productivity, such that a 1% point increase, ceteris paribus, in health burden would decrease labour productivity by 6.5% for the full sample estimate, 5.8% for the upper-middle-income, 22% in the lower middle income, and 26% for the low-income economies, respectively. Our results further indicates divergence effects, such that, the low income and lower-middle-income economies are most burdened by Covid-19 induced health crises, leading to diminished labour productivity compared with the upper-middle-income economies in Africa. This implies that Covid-19 exacerbated health burdens devalue Africa’s labour assets and forces the over-burdened economies’ labour productivity to diminish.