Shandre Mugan Thangavelu, Jeffrey Cheah Institute on Southeast Asia, Sunway University and Institute for International Trade, University of Adelaide: This paper examines the impact of COVID-19 workplace closures and stay-at-home orders on international trade using a gravity model. The paper suggests that the stay-at-home orders will reduce trade by decreasing import demand, while workplace closures, which mandate the closure of all non-essential workplaces, will reduce export supplies. This paper uses monthly world trade data to investigate how the two types of lockdown policies affect trade flows. They find a negative effect of workplace closures on trade except for intra-Asian trade, but stay-at-home orders had no significant and robust effects on trade.
Overall, this is an interesting paper using the latest COVID-19 data to examine the impacts on trade flows. However, there are several analytical and technical issues that the paper that should address.
First, it is not clear if a...