 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this session, a special session by the Partnership for Economic Policy. I am Jean Mariera. I'm the Executive Director of the Partnership for Economic Policy. Our session is titled, What can we run from inclusive adaptation and recovery policies responding to the COVID-19 crisis? In PEP, we provide ROCO evidence for ROCO solutions. We believe that in-country development charges require ROCO device solutions, and this is what we do best. This is what we are very proud of. What we do is that we produce high quality research from ROCO perspective. We build bridges between research and policy. We strengthen ROCO capacity, both for research and policy engagement. Then we boost project feasibility and impact on policy through dissemination activities. And then finally, we create connections for knowledge sharing across the group. Since 2002, we've worked in 64 countries where we have further research with supported more than 350 projects, and 40% of them are all income countries, and more than 1,000 researchers, 50% of whom are women. Something that we are very proud of, because the issue of gender parity, as we do, is not to say, especially among economists or in economic interventions. PEP, we support the researchers using a very intensive running and doing grant support program where we give researchers not just money, but we ensure that we invest in them very heavily. And every sort of this is very high quality research and also policy-engaged research that involves ROCO, government institutions, and policy makers who actually understand the ROCO context very well. Turning to the project I had about which my panelists will be talking about, we have what we call the core project, or COVID-19 responses for equity, funded by the International Development Research Centre of Canada. And the aim of this project is for forward. First, we assess the COVID-19 impacts and effectiveness of existing or potential policy responses. We provide evidence to inform the design of inclusive adaptation and recovery policies. Three, we develop country-level relevant tools to guide policy design and reform, and also ensure that the ROCO researchers and governments can use these tools. And finally, we identify general reasons that can guide inclusive responses and recovery policies, not just in these countries in question, but also in other developing countries. Really, we believe that the same could also apply in developed countries. Looking at the countries and methodologies, we are using two main approaches in this project. First, we have policy simulations from the micro point of view, micro simulations and micro simulations using computable general equilibrium analysis. For the micro simulations, we have projects in five countries and you'll be hearing about one short trade that is Argentina, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Ghana, Vietnam. For the computable general equilibrium analysis, we have Nigeria, we have Zimbabwe, we have Kenya and Tanzania. And finally, for the experimental impact evaluations, we have one project in Ivory Coast and another one in Benin. We are not able to talk about all countries in this session. You hear some feedback of it and then the rest, you can follow more information from our website. One thing that I would want to emphasize is the approach that we are using in this project, which is also what we are using in other ongoing PEP projects and that is core production of research. In the PEP projects, we have rocker-red projects through a collaborative approach whereby we have rocker teams who comprise senior researchers and we also have government officers as part of the team and the two sets of teams engage in periodic consultations first among themselves and then we target stakeholder institutions to ensure that the project is very well aligned with what is happening on the ground. This approach is very important for several reasons. First, it helps to align research questions with existing country-specific policy needs. Two, it helps to adapt research agenda involving policy needs. Three, it helps to increase ownership of resources by the targets, the coders and then finally, all these tend to maximize chances of evidence uptake to inform relevant policy processes and we have a lot of evidence that this is actually happening. Again, I would refer you to our website for more information. Just a quick example of what I'm talking about here. We have, in the case of the Zimbabwe project, the rocker researcher in this project was actually invited to present the findings to the Minister of Defence and Security who happened to have been appointed as the Chairman of the National COVID-19 Task Force. This Minister immediately presented the findings of this project to the Cabinet and the government is now awaiting for the final resource of this project so as to implement some of the recommendations in the context of the Zimbabwe project. We have many other cases like that. So, finally, let me introduce the three panelists that we have this afternoon. These are our researchers for the core projects and also other projects. We have first Riemann Kursis who is the Deputy Director of CEDRAS in the National University of Rapparta in Argentina. He'll be speaking about work based on micro-simulations in Argentina, Ecuador, and the ocean, or also mentioned about other countries. We have Vaka Ahmed who is the Joint Executive Director of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Pakistan who will be talking about experiences from computable general equilibrium analysis. And finally, we have Ester Awuni Adimi who is a researcher with RADES, University of Paragu, Benin who will be presenting on impact evaluation. So, let me just thank you and note that PEP, we are very thankful to the International Development Research Center for finding this work and other projects within PEP. We are also funded by Hewlett Foundation, actually two of the projects, the Experimental Impact Evaluation Projects are building on work that is funded by Hewlett Foundation. And then we also have work that is funded by the Global Affairs Canada. Thank you. I want to invite Williamo Kursis to start off with this presentation. Then he'll be followed by Vaka and Fahidane Ester in that order. Thank you and welcome. Thank you very much for joining or for listening. Thank you very much for organizing this conference and for the invitation. My name is Guillermo Kursis. I'm a researcher affidavit with PEP, the Partnership for Economic Policy, the Center for Distributive Studies at the Universidad Nacional de la Plata in Argentina and the University of Nottingham. Let me give you a little bit of background on the project. As rapid response policies were implemented to mitigate the immediate health, economic and social effects of the COVID-19 crisis, developing country populations, and especially those most vulnerable, were at risk of being left behind. In July 2020, Canada's IDRC awarded funding to PEP4Core, a new COVID-19 crisis recovery research initiative for inclusive adaptation and recovery policies that covered 11 countries in Africa, Asia and South America. I was involved with the two projects in South America in Argentina and Ecuador too, from which I will draw some examples and lessons. The originality of the project from PEP's side was that the organization worked directly with teams involving both local researchers and government institutions and partners were identified ex ante and were directly involved in the formulation of the research questions and of the analysis. Let me show you, give you a showcase of the results for Argentina. The research team in Argentina estimated that poverty levels rose to 47.5%, which represented almost 13 percentage points higher than the situation before the pandemic. But what I want to emphasize here is that these estimates were made when there was no official information on the effect of the crisis. And this project was led by Dr. Puig at the Center for Distributive Studies in La Platte in Argentina. His team found that the policy response in the form of direct cash transfers for most vulnerable households in the country, but also with furlough or employment support for those in the formal sector, substantially reduced the impact of the crisis on welfare indicators. For instance, the policy response produced the poverty rate by 3.16 percentage points. That is the incidence of poverty would have been 3 percentage points higher when comparing it with the situation without this response. And this means that 1 million people from population of 45 million were prevented from falling into poverty by means of these policy responses. And the effect of the crisis, but also the effectiveness of the response was higher for female-headed households. Without the emergency cash transfers, the average household income would have fallen by 23%. So what was the type of analysis? In here we have a figure produced by the research team in Argentina, where we can see poverty and genie inequality levels before and after the crisis. These are the team's estimates. And the main task besides estimating the impact of the crisis when there was no official information available yet, besides this important task, the team estimated this micro-simulated a counterfactual distribution of income without the policy response. And this is from where the results I quoted a minute ago come from. Here we have also a breakdown by the type of household and we can see that the impact of the crisis was higher for female-headed households, but also the effectiveness of policies in fighting the effects of the crisis was higher for female-headed households. The Ecuador team also did a similar analysis and showed that the modest emergency transfer from the government, which was substantially lower in terms of resources than the one in Argentina, had very limited effects. There was a very large impact of the crisis on per capita income, with a fall of about 28%, and a huge increase in poverty rates, more than doubling, which was especially bad for households working in the informal sector. The sectors most affected by the crisis were construction, restaurant and hotels and personal services, and female workers are overrepresented into the latter two. And just to show you the type of analysis that the team conducted, we can see that they derived the whole distribution of household per capita income before the crisis, after the crisis, and again the micro-simulated counterfactual of the income distribution without the government assistance, and this is where all the results come from, from these comparisons. So regarding the results in other countries, I cannot of course cover the 11 countries here, but other micro-analysis concentrated on climate effects by sector and their impact on poverty, whereas the countries where PEP developed a macro approach were based on general equilibrium models that gazed the effect through production, tax collections, import, exports, prices, and other mechanisms, and all the documents are available on the PEP website. So what are the salient issues beyond the mere sanitary emergency? The social effects of the crisis imply increased poverty and inequality with longer-term effects in the form of loss of human capital, the education of children, and hysteresis in employment for adults. And we want to emphasize that we find a gendered impact of the crisis whereby women were certainly more affected in terms of employment and poverty. And there were also very large fiscal impacts that were covered by the more macro studies in the project. So what are the lessons for the future and further analysis regarding the continuing 2021 pandemic? The best option seems to be some combination of direct cash transfers with employment support, but the death of the crisis implies that the targeting has to be very broad to minimize exclusion error at the expense of inclusion error. The crisis was so generalized that the narrow targeting of social policy is certainly not the best way to reach all households affected by the crisis, which were much more than what we would have had in a normal recession or crisis. Of course, we were very adamant in terms of incorporating the gender dimension both in the analysis and in government assistance, because female-headed households were the most affected by this. In terms of further analysis, the gender impact of the pandemic and looking at which sectors were most affected and how the health reach different types of households is very important. And finally, we think we can derive some policy lessons for developing countries beyond pandemics, both during emergencies and normal times from the reaction to the pandemic. So thank you very much. As I said, this presentation summarizes the contributions to partnership for economic policy to the project entitled simulations and future parents of policy responses and interventions to promote inclusive adaptation and recovery from the COVID-19 crisis with the assistance and financial support of IDRC. I hope we can meet our esteemed colleagues at wider and at other institutions soon in person. Thank you very much. Hi, everyone. Let me start by thanking the organizers for the teams who have been involved in excellent organization of this conference. The title which was researched by the Pakistan team was fiscal policy response to COVID-19 pandemic, and this really looks into the response of Pakistan's government using fiscal instruments during the first and second wave of COVID and what has worked, what hasn't worked, and what are the lessons for the future waves of COVID or similar disasters. Amid COVID-19, at least until the second wave, economic growth had plummeted to negative 0.5%. Manufacturing sector was hardest hit. Public investment had declined, given that there were other needs which government had to respond to the sort of diversion of public resources to its pandemic-related needs. Around 3 million jobs were lost due to the pandemic, and the proportion of those living in poverty increased between 24 to 33%, depending upon the definition. We set out after comprehensive consultations with the National Planning Commission and Federal Board of Revenue and the team initiated the study on effectiveness of fiscal policy interventions as response to the pandemic. We looked into the actual fiscal policy interventions which the government had undertaken to answer questions such as what were the macroeconomic and welfare impacts of changes in structure and rates of indirect taxes and direct and indirect taxes in federal and provincial budgets? How have these fiscal policy changes provided relief to firms and households? How were changes in tariff policy designed? And how far these measures rescued the firms in the trade sector? And what may have been the incidence of production subsidies? And how far these measures supported firms in the agriculture sector? We looked into four main simulations. The first one was reduction in sales tax by 3.5% for activities under large-scale manufacturing. Our second simulation focused on reduction in tariffs by 2% on priority agriculture and food items. The third simulation was around sales tax on select services which was reduced by 3%. And fourth was a production subsidy which was allowed to the cotton sector. And we look at the impact of all four of them separately. Our findings inform us that the growth impact of fiscal policy is provided to the manufacturing sector. That's where the highest growth impacts are basically seen, followed by the policy measure which included reduction in tariffs and duties on the imports of agricultural inputs, agricultural intermediate goods, and food items. We also see the investment impact of policy measures. Here, the highest gain has been when the tax burden on the services sector was reduced. And given that services sector contributes more than 55% to the national economy, the growth impact was higher here followed by the measure which aimed at reduction in taxes on the manufacturing sector. In terms of the reduction in price inflation, it is the first policy measure which was aimed at reducing taxes for the manufacturing sector which lends us the highest gains and consumer prices fall down relatively more than has seen in the other simulations. Impact on trade while positive for all the simulations which include reduction in taxes for services, manufacturing, reduction tariffs on agriculture and food, as well as increase in production subsidy for cotton sector. However, the highest gain that one sees is when taxes services are liberalized. Manufacturing sector imports also change as a response to our simulations. It is of course intuitive given that the first simulation, the first policy intervention was directly aimed at reduction in tax burden on the manufacturing sector. Here, of course, we see that as manufacturing exports go up, the import demand of the manufacturing sector also picks up. In terms of export gains for non-manufacturing sectors, one doesn't see a very large gain in agriculture despite of the fiscal policy is provided to the sector. But for the services sector, once the general sales tax or the indirect tax on services sector is reduced, one does see a decent export gain for that sector as well. This of course includes services subsectors like IT and ICT amongst other activities which digital enterprises are undertaking whose output in fact increased due to the online and remote working during the pandemic. Impact on household consumption, one could see that there is some widening of inequality here while consumption gains are positive for all types of households. It is the urban households represented in all our simulations here and we take a short-term and a medium-term scenario here and we could readily see that the gains seen by for example urban and rural poor are less than the gains seen by rural rich and urban rich. Likewise, in case of food consumption as well, one sees that while there are positive gains for all types of households, the gains for the rich seem to be higher. So the hypothesis that pandemic may have led to some widening of inequalities seems to hold true here. We also see that in case of wages, the wages of skilled workers are increasing more than the unskilled workers. In terms of gender inequalities, we are mindful that data limitations we could not have a gender-aware CGE analysis for. However, we do have some findings on the subject from our qualitative analysis and interviews with women-led enterprises in Pakistan and we do have a report from the World Bank Office which reveals how women-owned firms which are usually smaller than firms owned by men are 8% more likely to lose their entire revenue during the pandemic. In the micro-enterprise sector, the uncertainty was much higher for women and informal enterprises. There are three policy implications coming out of our work. The first one is that there is a clear need to study the potential of all federal and provincial level taxes and what role these taxes could play in emergency times. Additional simulation exercises and future studies are required to understand if cut in compliance cost of taxes may lead to favorable gains. Second, given that we see some inequality enhancing impacts of tax policy, therefore the future exercise could offer insights into what supplementary expenditures or social protection related measures could be expanded to compensate for increase in inequalities. And finally, tax policy changes amid COVID-19 haven't resulted in significant tax for the gain for agriculture and food sector. This needs to be explored further as this sector was able to see rise in availability of important inputs even during the pandemic. This sector received a lot of tax policy liberalization interventions as well. Additionally, local inputs were also subsidized. So these are the three main key takeaways which in the coming days we look forward to exploring further with the policy makers, particularly the National Planning Commission and Federal Board of Revenue in Pakistan. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the presentation of the key funding of our research entitled adaptation to an recovery from the COVID-19 crisis in Benin. As you know for several developing countries such as Benin, agriculture is emerging as a predominant sector for economies and social development. In Benin, the agriculture sector, like soybean sector, has many challenges. For the 2009, the sudden health crisis could slow down and economic activity is functioning. The case, this point is for coronavirus pandemic which became a global crisis since 2020. Since the crisis, we know that the claim in the household become the loss of jobs and the increase in household spending. Like all countries, Benin has taken different social and economic action to have an advantage of the pandemic and listen to its negative effects. Then UNPS also supports its members to implement government action but there has not yet been a study showing actual action for the benefits of producers and especially for the want of soybean production. Our main research question are what is the producer's knowledge level in practice following the COVID-19? What are the producers' perceptions and strategies developed against the effects of COVID-19? The study area is made of four departments in the north and central part of Benin that they will collect in the total of 19 villages and 75 soy producers were actually surveyed. The data were collected through household cautionary and individual cautionary and the analysis of data consists in providing simple descriptive statistics. What are we finding in this research? In this research, we're finding that water access in jail and sanitation conditions are not met in the surveyed household. The agenda inequality in households as well as education training associates members. For knowledge attitude in practice, we saw that in majority 94% of soybean producers surveyed at work of the existence of COVID-19. Moonlight study by Desperate and All 2020 which showed that producers dot the existence of COVID-19 in Africa. The knowledge score are high 8 to 9 and not much different for men and women. Carbomba and All 2020 reported the same trend on the population of urban areas in Kinshasha. More than half of men and women consider COVID-19 to be a reality. Only 15% of producers believe that the crisis is likely to return the photo. In response to the COVID-19 crisis, farm households have adopted various practices like barrier testing. For adaptation strategy and perception, the result is that only 6% of male and 4% of female have benefited from action initiative or external intervention related to COVID-19. The majority of respondents would like to receive more support from the government but most of the government's support to farmers take the form of refinancing of loan granted by financial institutions to produce. The track down is not materialism. This demonstrates the inadequacy between the real needs and the corrective visual offered by governments. For producer initiative and the effects of COVID-19, we can note that the few main strategies developed relate to reducing the area so and workforce. For effect, we can note that the COVID-19 impacted both the economic and social dimension of children, men and women in target households. The perceived effects are more negative than positive. Only 13% of men and 9% of women have perceived the effect of COVID-19 on the household. Women are most affected in the household and these varies from one dimension to another, food, employment, income. For children, the household COVID-19 had more effects on education. For risk analyzers, we can note that producer remains optimistic in relation to the impact of the crisis of COVID-19. COVID-19 limited the trade and migration observed in the run-up to the agricultural campaign. And producers have therefore rapidly developed the overtive of agricultural activities. For these results, we can conclude that this work makes it possible to analyze the level of knowledge, attitude and practice of soybean producers in the face of COVID-19. To analyze the strategy that the producers themselves have developed in the face of the effects of COVID-19. To understand the perception of what they really want as support, their own initiative, how they contract the effects of COVID-19 and there is their own income-generating activity. The courage of artwork show significant aspects of human life will not only contribute to scientific knowledge on the issues of crisis of COVID-19. It's also called on political decision maker to issue development action in the direction of supports to small production household in order to improve their resilience to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in the future. Thank you for your attention. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for the presentation. And thank you, our distinguished listeners. Now we have about 10 minutes, actually about five minutes for Q&A. And we will first pick the questions which are in the chat. Please write questions on the Q&A because I will not be able to listen to you. But we are going to start with the first question that we have based on Guadiermo's presentation. And the question is where is the line between developing comprehensive policies for adaptation and recovery and between maintaining the public safety and national security of countries, especially at the rail level? So, Guadiermo, can you please unmute and try to answer that? I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you. Can you read the question again? I'm sorry about that. Okay, can you see the question on the Q&A? Oh, yeah, just open the Q&A. You can see this one question. I don't know whether there's another one now. I cannot see any questions on the Q&A. Oh, Q&A, I'm sorry. I was in the chat. Where is the line between developing comprehensive policies for adaptation and recovery and between maintaining public safety and national security of countries, especially at the health level? From Salam al-Rabadi. Thank you, Salam. I think that's a very good question. I think I would defer to my political scientist colleagues and security specialists. But I would say that I think that the policies for adaptation and recovery have been implemented by all types of governments in in the world successfully. And some governments have been more draconian and others have been less draconian in their measures. And I haven't seen any convincing evidence that more erosion of civil liberties in the context of pandemic have been have resulted in more successful approaches. I think the pandemic has been very bad for everyone. And I would spend more resources in trying to find vaccines than in restrictive measures. But that's a personal opinion. I wouldn't say that that comes out of the IDRC sponsored project. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Vaka, do you want to say anything about that? Do you have any ideas? I don't know whether he can hear us. He's joining us remotely. Yes, I can hear you. Can you just repeat the question just for my clarity? Sorry, can you hear us? Vaka? Yes, I can hear you. Can you just repeat the question for my clarity? Okay. The question is, where is the line between developing comprehensive policies for adaptation and recovery and between maintaining the public safety and national security of countries, especially at the health level? Did you get it? Yes. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I think very briefly. One is that in the case of the pandemic, if I'm understanding the question correctly, we really don't know the timeline as yet. So I think the question is pointing towards a very pertinent direction that the thin line between recovery and then, of course, growth phase or coming fully out of the crisis really becomes very blurred. The line becomes blurred. And I think this is the challenge for policies aiming at adaptation that one is really learning by doing as we grapple with the future waves of COVID. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm sure everyone can hear you. We have another question. So again, either of you can answer and we are running out of time. So the second question is, do any studies provide guidance on the adverse impact of slow recovery in countries that will not have much vaccination coverage until rate 2022 at the best? Vaka, Gudiyama, did you get the question? Yes. Please go. Gudiyama, you are mute. You can unmute yourself. So we haven't covered that issue. Thank you, William. I think that's a very good question. We haven't covered different speeds of recovery as of yet, but that's certainly an angle we would like to look at. Unfortunately, every time we think we know what's going on with this pandemic, we get more surprising results. For instance, everything seemed to show that we would have a very bad third wave of the Delta variant right now in South America and fingers crossed that hasn't happened yet, but we had this. So I haven't seen any work, but I agree that perhaps the focus should now move on to the recovery and how to speed it up and how to make sure that it is the most inclusive. The results of the recovery are inclusive and well spread out across societies. Okay. Thank you. Maybe the last one and I will ask Vaka maybe to address this. I think it's universal. The question is that, okay, the country specific presentations, I mean, evidence is very important, but are there any thoughts on how priorities are changing as the pandemic is taking so much longer than expected and there's growth and even recovery. Yes, certainly. I think there are now good resources coming up to really track the recovery from pandemic as well as the incidence of pandemic as we face the future waves. And if one is trying to look at the macroeconomic impacts across the waves and as they are evolving during the current wave, I find that the IMF cracker, IMF COVID tracker is perhaps one of the best ones, but then you also have these sectoral crackers. So WFP has one for cracking food security, which is shaped by FAO as well. And then of course, you have a tracker coming up by ILO on, for example, the incidence on that labor market. So yes, there are resources out there which are tracking the incidence at a macro level as well as at a sectoral level. More of course needs to be done. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay. I see a final question and I know we've ran out of time. It's asking, is there a conflict between the policies of economic recovery and the policies of preserving the health of citizens? Where should the priority be? Anyone who wants to try that? Yes, Guillermo. Yes. Thank you, Salam again. I would say with all due respect, I think this is a false dichotomy because children that don't go to school, people who don't get treated for cancer or other chronic diseases, etc., because of the emergency, because of shutdowns are also problems of health and problems of welfare that we'll have now or in the near future. So I think governments are experimenting, and as Arjan says, that is taking much longer and there's a lot of uncertainty. But I think most governments in the world are trying to balance the health and welfare costs of the pandemic with the health and welfare costs of containing it. And so I wouldn't put it directly into a contradiction between recovery and health. With that recovery, we will have, we will still have a lot of, the non-recovery will still have a lot of costs that we must compute in balance. Thank you very much. Esther, are you there? Do you have a final word? Maybe the three panellists? I'll just ask all of you to give maybe a parting shot if you want to make any comment. Esther, are you there? Vakar, do you have anything you want to add before we cross? Yes, just taking lead from the last response, I think it was important. I think while of course health comes first, the costs which of course health crisis imposes are also important and many countries are unable to afford those costs. So there in of course a global partnership is required to protect. But then at a country level, we really now need to master how to manage these lockdowns and how to really preserve our employment, particularly in the low income strata or the informal sector employment so that the impact on livelihoods is the least amid the lockdowns. Thank you. Thank you very much, Vakar. Esther, do you hear me? Do you have anything in a parting shot? No? Guriem or anything? Yes? Just very briefly and this is something we've been discussing with the whole PEP team. Maybe the silver lining if any of these is that we've seen pretty good responses all over the world in countries with different levels of development and perhaps I mean we've seen social protection policies expanding and having better coverage over the last two decades. Perhaps these will leave us with the right infrastructure to have better prepared emergency responses for the next I mean there is going to be a next tsunami, a next earthquake, a next hurricane etc. in different countries and so perhaps this will leave us with infrastructure to better deal with these kind of emergencies. Thank you. Thank you very much for those great thoughts and thank you everyone. Unfortunately we have to stop now because there's a fireside chat that started two minutes ago just to thank the presenters and those who attended. Everyone who attended just to say that we have much more than this and please visit our website for more information on the work that we are doing. We are having difficulties actually Vakar is joining via my mobile phone because he could not throw in and Esther was also having difficulties but she's in the background. So thank you everyone. Let's proceed to the fireside chat and we look forward to interacting with you. Get our contact on the PEP website and feel free to send questions to us. We'll be happy to give you more information. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Bye bye. You are free to leave. Bye. Jean thank you so much for saving the session. Really appreciate it. Thank you. And thank you. Thank you for the trouble Vakar. Bye.