Economics of Lockdown: Insights on Building Back Better in Post-Pandemic Philippines

Abstract

COVID-19 originated in China with the first reported cases in December 2019, and then spread across well over 200 countries, territories and areas in less than four months. In the Philippines, the first confirmed case was on January 30, 2020 (involving a 38-year-old Chinese national from Wuhan), and the first recorded COVID-19 related death outside China was in Metro Manila on 2 February 2020.1 COVID-19 cases in the Philippines shot up to over 35,000 confirmed cases, and over 1,200 deaths in a span of less than five months since that first case. Unfortunately, it appears that the Philippines is still stuck in the long first wave of infections. Metro Manila and Metro Cebu, the two largest urban agglomerations in the country, have endured long periods of severe social lockdown put in place to limit the spread of the coronavirus in and from these pandemic epi-centres. COVID-19 and the resulting lockdown measures have plunged the Philippine economy into its first recession in two decades. The government estimates that the lockdown of Northern Luzon alone could have cost up to PhP24 billion a day in output losses.