The Regional Economic Impact of Modern Pandemics and Epidemics.

The current COVID-19 pandemic had, and is still having, damaging effects on economic activities. However, similarly to past pandemic and epidemic episodes, its impact risks to be geographically uneven. Based on pandemic and epidemic episodes of the latest two decades, in this paper we try to conjecture the possible future impact that the current pandemic may have on several regional outcomes such as per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and employment. Specifically, we investigate how this impact differs across regions, evaluating some of the different channels through which the heterogeneous effect of health crises may be transmitted to regional economies.