The “COVID-19: Updates from Singapore” weekly webinar series is a forum for leading clinicians, scientists, public health officials and policy makers to share insights from their fields of study. The tenth edition of the webinar was held on Thursday, 11 June.
Professor Andrew Rose, Distinguished Professor and Dean of the Business School at the National University of Singapore (NUS) was the invited guest speaker for this week. Prof Rose’s expertise primarily covers international trade, finance and macroeconomics. For this week’s session, Prof Rose discussed various economic issues which have surfaced as a result of COVID-19, such as uncertainty measures, supply shocks, government spending and issues that impact aggregate demand.
In his talk titledThe Economy After COVID-19, Prof Rose strongly emphasised the extremely high level of economic uncertainty that pervades this period. This is due to unknown factors such as the availability of a vaccine, access to potential ones, and the possibility of future pandemic waves that could extend the length of lockdowns around the world. Countries around the globe are suffering heavily from the universal economic impact resulting from COVID-19. From an economic point of view, there was a big negative supply shock, as production stopped when the supply of labour evaporated following the imposed lockdowns in different countries. Consequently, a big negative demand shock has been felt because people are more reluctant to purchase goods and services due to lower income streams. To cushion the impact, Prof Rose mentioned that governments around the world, especially the richer nations, have aggressively responded by enhancing support programmes and policies.
Prof Rose highlighted that labour markets in Asia and Europe will be affected by varying degrees. Looking ahead, he warned of potentially transformational changes in different facets of the economy, such as in production, face-to-face service industries and tourism, which are affected by social distancing measures. This will lead to the rise in inequality among already disenfranchised groups, while affecting the nature of international trade.
WATCH: COVID-19 Updates from Singapore: Webinar 10 | Prof Andrew K. Rose
Join us next week for the “COVID-19: Updates from Singapore” session on 18 June 2020, where guest speaker Dr Marie-Paule Kieny, Director of the Priority Research Programme on Antimicrobial resistance at Inserm, will be speaking about the development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Register at https://medicine.nus.edu.sg/cet/webinar/.
