 Good morning or afternoon wherever you are. My name is Sam Jones. I'm a research fellow with UNU wider based here in Maputo. Thank you very much for joining us for this parallel session on Southern Africa during the pandemic. We have four presentations and five speakers from Mozambique in South Africa looking at a number of different aspects of the pandemic. What we have is a bit like the previous sessions. The Q&A function is there too for your questions. So please do make sure you click on on the right hand of your screen. Hopefully session Q&A. So make sure you're within the session then Q&A and feel free to place your questions there. We have as I said five presenters. We have two colleagues from Southern Africa. Well from South Africa. Well speaking about Southern Africa Haroon Borat and Kudzai Mataba and we have three from Mozambique, Ivan Manik, Rosario Beto and Finorio Castigl. I will present to you individually just prior to the presentations. The presentations are recorded just to avoid any technical glitches so we'll see how that goes. So with the interests of time let's move to the first presentation which are two short presentations together. They are by starting with Rosario Beto and then followed by Finorio Castigl. They are two Mozambican researchers based at the the Ministry of Economy and Finance respectively looking at macroeconomic issues and on the microeconomic and poverty issues. So Elena would you please press the play button on the first two presentations. Thank you so much. Hello to everyone. I am Rosario Beto from Mozambique. I will present now the study about the macroeconomic impact of COVID-19 in Mozambique. This study was made by Marcia Cialingo, Sam Jones, Michael Kehler, Ibrahim Mouserji, Tiki Seventa, Fintarp and me. Our first case of COVID-19 in Mozambique was registered on 22 of March of 2020 but it is important to note that the effects of the impact of this pandemic began before before the virus arrives itself in Mozambique. But after our first case we can see on the graph that the numbers, the daily cases were increased during the year even the accumulated cases were increased until we registered our peak in the end of the year. Due to this the government of Mozambique makes efforts to contain the spread of the pandemic. However, missions to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. This study aims to assess the economic costs of important and domestic shocks of COVID-19. We can see it on external and internal shocks and the state of emergency implemented by the government of Mozambique. For this we can assume or identify four channels through which the state of emergency have negatively affected individual economic sectors. The first channel has assumption is called supply shocks at industry level, second demand shock, third the investment shock and finally the fourth is export shocks. The approach used to this study is called social accounting matrix multiply model. This model or firmware it's a matrix that maps out the income and expenditure accounts of industries and single accounts for enterprises, households, government, saving investment and the rest of the world. We consider around 51 activities and around 52 commodities that we call products. We assumed two scenarios. The first scenario prevents households from spending their money and the second scenario force the closure of non-essential industry. So in this scenario we assume that the closure of activity is a contraction of good and service demand that the industry produce. In consequence of that there is a drop on production. So in the first scenario we assume an impact on household demand. Looking for our results we can see that our first case was in the end of match and period or the first quarter it was a period without COVID-19 in Mozambique. So we can evaluate the impact of COVID-19 after the first quarter. So we will see the impact on second, third and the last quarter of 2010. So first of all we will look at the impact on GDP. We can see from domestic and foregrain channel that the highest or the biggest impact of pandemic on GDP were on foregrain channel in the second, third, even in the last quarter of 2020. But in the end of the year we can see that Mozambique lost around 3.6% of GDP. Have a look to the expenditure component on GDP looking for the identity formula to GDP calculated by consumption, investments, exports and imports. We can see that exports where the channel that the pandemic presented a big impact. This is followed by investments. Have a look into the production by industry. The impact of pandemic on GDP was higher in the mining and trade sectors. When we make some comparison of domestic and foregrain channel, the foregrain channel shows the biggest impact than the domestic channel. Moving to other components to employment, we saw the impact on GDP. Now we will look at the impact of the pandemic on employment. What stands out is the great impact on commerce and accommodation. It is due to direct higher impact on employment output and high elasticity employment output for activities of service in general. We can see this impact on employment in commerce and accommodation. Even in the GDP we can see the accommodation impact is also higher. We can make a summary of those impacts on GDP and employment. We can see in the left some we have around 25 activities, but the first and the second is accommodation and food services and wholesale and retail trade. Even in GDP, even in employment, we can see that these activities had the biggest impact of COVID-19. Moving to income of our households, looking for the lowest and the highest incomes, making some comparison in these groups. In those groups, we can see significant difference, but we can note that lowest incomes is equivalent to around 80% of our population and the 20% corresponds to population with higher incomes. To conclude, it can be seen that the most impact on the economy results from the exporter channel. It's a foregrain channel. Therefore, it has an external origin. Direct effects are seen show the economy. To conclude, we can say that Mozambique laws around the 3.6% of GDP because of the pandemic, but when we look for the real GDP published by the National Institute of Statistics in Mozambique, it was around 1.3% of GDP. But if we sum this real GDP and the GDP that Mozambique laws have grown around 2.3%, if Mozambique had no COVID-19. Some recommendations we can make to our country is to diversify exports, investing in infrastructure such as roads, bridge, investing more in developing the potential of the domestic market, sorry, improving the business environment and value chain. And finally, the government of Mozambique must adapt an inclusive and robust industrialization policy focused on manufacturing. So thank you for your attention. My name is Finor Castigo. I'm from Mozambique. I work in the Ministry of Economy and Finance. I will address COVID-micro-impact and four other authors was involved in this study. This study helped the impact of COVID-19 and the measure implemented by the government of Mozambique on COVID-19 and construction. The method is based on the macro-colonics impact by better at all using the household but survey year 14. The data is about 11,000. I was interviewed three times over 12 months and the data is representative at the national urban, rural and provincial level. Our assumption is that there is a loss in income and wage and employment. The main result of perception decrease between 7.1 and 14.4% and poverty increase between 4.3 and 9.9% into 19 and 20. We use three analytical approaches that combine different channels. Each approach using the labor information by sector, by education and rural urban residents or by income content and rural urban residents processing who is affected. Then we apply the consumption income or consumption wage to estimating consumption and poverty impact. In this picture we present results in terms of percentage reduction in consumption and percentage point increase from the initial poverty rates at different levels. For the increase in poverty rate we also include the result corresponding to absolute number of people falling into poverty as estimating using the population projection for 2020. Our conclusion, COVID-19 has produced a setback for poverty reduction in Mozambique. Many more households fell in poverty or try and drop in consumption. The long-term structural drivers of poverty seem to be still at work. You know, but new jobs likely emerge. Our recommendation is essential to supporting household and rural areas. It's a necessary implementation of the Bolshevik network for vulnerable groups at the risk of experiencing huge drops in consumption due to unexpected shocks such as COVID. It's especially important for people working in the informal sector in the urban areas or in the personnel sector. Thank you. Great, thank you. That was our first presentation looking at essentially simulating some of the impacts of COVID-19 in Mozambique taking both a macroeconomic and a microeconomic perspective. I should note that these papers are available on the IGM, the Inclusive Growth in Mozambique website as well as the UNU wider website. If you want to take a closer look, we can share the link. Now moving on to our next presentation, very pleased to have with us Harun Borat who probably doesn't need to be introduced, but just in case. He is a professor of economics at UCT in Cape Town, director of the Development Policy Research Unit, also a member of the Board of Economic Advisers to the South African Presidency and an esteemed member of our UNU wider board. Great to have you with us Harun. We're looking forward to your presentation and please press play. Good morning everybody. So the attempt in this sort of whistle-stop tour in terms of understanding the economic impact of COVID-19 in South Africa is really three-part. I'm going to try and give you an overview of the GDP employment and some of the early evidence on inequality effects and then look secondly at the what I call the Ramaphosa package as a stimulus package in response to COVID-19 and specifically focus on social assistance and then very very briefly talk about some of the emerging debt dynamics on the macro side for South Africa. So really as is well known this data we most of us sort of live with in the last year suggests peaks and troughs. So we currently are South Africa in the midst of the third wave. Let me just find my laser pointer so you can see us here in the red. We are currently in the third wave in absolute terms in terms of infections. We're still below the sort of UK, India, US type figures but certainly following very similar patterns of the emerging markets. We had an early sort of strong lockdown in terms of the pandemic and what that did was to bias time for the inevitable growth in infections. So we've followed paths that are very similar to other developing countries and I would suspect similar to some of the emerging markets in Sub-Saharan Africa. We've switched now towards as as is most of the developing world towards procuring vaccines and a vaccination program has been rolled up with a lot of support and collaboration with the private sector. So that's the next phase. What the damage the damage that was done by the pandemic is clear. I've got here one graphic. There's so many of these but this is sort of the 2020 effect if you like in terms of GDP growth rates. South Africa is in the blue bar so we saw a contraction of about 7% over the period that's compared to a sample of middle-income countries and we pretty much in the middle of that sample slightly above the average. You could take the simple average for that sample but in essence there's a strong prediction of a bounce back between 2 and 5% for next year and we'll wait and see whether that's playing out. Some of the numbers are encouraging in terms of growth and I'll get back to that a little bit later. I think what's important is to look at the heterogeneous effect across developing countries and certainly in Southern Africa, our one neighbour, Botswana, has seen a much larger contraction. It'd be interesting to hear what other colleagues say in terms of the Southern Africa effect. Now in terms of employment I think one of the things that that was clear is that we had non-linear effects in terms of employment outcomes over the quarters. So what I've done here is take 2019 right so that's employment across the four quarters for 2019 in the solid line and then the distribution of employment across the four quarters for 2020. What's very clear is we had this massive contraction of about 2.2 million jobs using the official quarterly labour force survey statistics but then there's some pullback if you like into the third and fourth quarters. So in any effect if you look at us across the quarterly figures for 2020 what we see is a net job loss of about 1.4 million. Just as a comparator during the Great Recession, South Africa recorded about 900,000 jobs lost. Now notice in terms of the GDP contraction of 7% this is a decrease of about 8% so a slightly more elastic response on the employment side relative to GDP. Just to keep in mind this is the trend of course that we want to be looking at. Certainly some of the figures for unfortunately for the first quarter of 2021 are not encouraging in terms of the growth and employment. Now one of the interesting things at least for us as labour economists is that we focus on the extensive margins so we really are looking at changes in employment if you look at the Great Recession and the numbers there and the work that was done there but one of the things that we don't usually look at at least in South Africa is what happened at the intense of margins just because the movement isn't great and you can see the solid line for 2019 no real change in the share so this is the percentage of workers reporting zero hours of work that doesn't really change in 2019 but look at the massive spike in the second quarter of 2020. What this suggests is of course a massive so about 15% of workers report still being employed but working zero hours effectively employers have sent them home and either continue to pay their wages or and that's the income loss side have actually reduced their wages and I think that's a really important aspect of the pandemic in terms of the negative income shocks even though it may have been transitory because as we move into the fourth quarter this has stabilized. So what about that wage reduction so if we look at wages across the percentile there's a little bit of good news in that most of the wage reduction we saw in South Africa was for 90th and 75th percentile workers the larger reductions were there and as we go down the wage distribution post pandemic right so that's post the dotted line if you like in the pandemic period sorry we see smaller reductions for workers at lower percentiles so you've got negative income shocks yes but it seems to be percentage terms larger for for higher income workers or workers further up the wage distribution. The difficulty though right so and this is the story that's emerging is that you've got wage so you've got you've got employment losses right north of 700 000 and that seems to be mainly for for low income households so if we look at the employment contraction right so the employment relative to the first quarter of 2021 sorry first quarter of 2020 the biggest reduction is for individuals coming from households in the poorest 20 percent of the distribution right and you see that that trend continues right through the quarters and the least affected are those in the richest 20 percent of the household distribution in terms of employment so the two-part effect is yes wage reduction seems to be large in percentage terms for higher earning workers but certainly the biggest job loss is for individuals from poorer households. The Gini coefficient of course has those two things happening right so on the one hand just mechanically you've got this reduction in wages at the top end but also these this massive fallout of job losses so in other words the zero earners right grow if you like in terms of in terms of the job losses that you see we only measuring here the wage Gini right and so what we see with the wage Gini is this sharp increase initially and then a claw back slightly by the fourth quarter I think it's a more interesting question to see what's happened to overall inequality so now moving to the sectoral profile of employment losses I'm aware of running out of time there's sort of a couple of big results so this proportionate share of the job losses were actually in the secondary sector so if you look at the last column 30 percent of all job losses emanated from the secondary sector whereas they only constitute about 19 percent of all jobs so effectively in the main you've got job losses mainly in the secondary sector and if you run through this for semi-skilled and unskilled workers however specifically interesting is this block on formality what we call formality but essentially what it suggests is that and I should note that this is for a slightly different period second quarter 2020 versus second quarter 2019 so that's why my job losses are slightly higher this was at the peak the majority of job losses or 50 percent of job losses actually came from workers in the informal sector and private households in other words domestic services and for formal sector workers the overwhelming majority of these workers were private non-unionized workers right and so effectively that's the prototype of the typical worker that lost their job right they tended to be either male or female so there wasn't an overwhelming share of gender differentiation at least on these results they may change if you look at different time periods the majority were African workers but tended to be in the informal sector in domestic work and and probably non-unionized the response from President Ramaphosa was swift just to show on the right hand side in in comparative terms this was a significant stimulus package probably one of the highest in the developing world certainly one of the highest in the emerging market and middle-income country sample I want to concentrate very quickly on social assistance the 50 billion package you see here there's massive spike in grants right the number of grant recipients after the March 2020 outbreak of the pandemic and the lockdown starts but it's very clear the majority of this was due to the new grant so South Africa has introduced a new grant called the COVID-19 social relief of the stress grant think of it as a grant that's supposed to cover individuals who are unemployed or in informal sector what happens is through these new grants and the top ups that the president offered or cabinet offered or government offered you reach 41% of the population so this is massive increase from about 30 of about 10% of the population now coming on stream through this new grant it's far more evenly distributed across the deciles of the distribution if you look at grants these are based on our own back-end calculations not actual administrative data we would suggest looking at our absolute figures that if you if you reach into the seventh decil of the distribution you are reaching a large number of workers that lost their jobs either because they were in the informal sector of domestic services so the COVID grant at least the early evidence suggests did its job the problem is with this massive stimulus package and growth contraction is pre-COVID-19 we face a deficit of GDP ratio of 7% this spike to 16% in the supplementary budget during in the midst of COVID-19 but this has dramatically fallen to 9.3% principally because of this resource revenue windfall so we have this breathing space offered to us by the commodity supercycle that seems to be occurring the figure to keep in mind and that's what this this data tries to do is to show if we hit revenue shortfalls of say 30% right based on a 6% GDP you've got a deficit of GDP ratio that's going to go up to about 17% so effectively the number to keep in mind is both growth rates and the consequent revenue generation from that so in conclusion you've had a massive shock 7% of GDP and and at the margin a larger employment shock and and the stimulus package was designed to at least shore up some of those massive income losses initially and I think one of the things that that's really really important with respect to how we think about the combination of policy packages for South Africa going forward is how one manages that through in terms of the rising debt to GDP ratios thanks very much great thank you so much for that excellent presentation maybe just one thing that highlights to me there is the you know the importance of having these good quality rich data that was available in South Africa to be able to track some of these events in quasi real time time is running so I'm very pleased to welcome our third presenter Kuzai Matava she is a legal scholar with an advanced degree in international trade and investment law has worked with tips in Pretoria and now I believe is with the international trade center in Geneva so now we're shifting the focus a little bit to trade and some of the legal challenges well the regional challenges involved in continuing trade during the COVID-19 pandemic thank you Elena please press play the title of this working paper is COVID-19 and trade facilitation in southern Africa implications for the african continental free trade agreement this paper looked at the importance of trade facilitation in Africa and they went on to give a broad overview of the impact of COVID-19 on trade in the region it looked at the regional trade facilitation responses taken by the ricks at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and then went on to forward some policy considerations towards the african continental free trade agreement learning from the key findings of the case studies taken within the southern african region trade facilitation refers to the broad range of measures that serve to streamline and simplify the technical and legal procedures in the trade of goods the aim of trade facilitation is to lower the overall cost of trade by significantly decreasing the amount of time it takes for goods to travel from one country to the next transportation costs in africa remain extremely high it is approximated that 63% that they are at least 63% higher than those experienced in developed economies and at least 135% higher than those in europe a practical example of this would be that a 3 000 kilometer journey from koloesi in the drc near the southern border with zambia to derbin on the north south corridor could take up to 38 days during the peak period of which plus or minus 29 days will be spent at borders due to delays this effectively means that this 3 000 kilometer rail journey will be taken at a speed of four kilometers per hour which is clearly unsustainable customs transactions through major corridors on average take 20 to 30 different parties 40 documents and 200 data elements within the context of a highly paper-based system which further increases the cost of trade this situation is juxtaposed against many african countries high reliance on revenues from tax-related from trade-related taxes in order to sustain their day-to-day governmental functionality what the coven 19 pandemic did was confirm what we already knew about trade in africa for example that intra african exports are more resilient than africa's exports to the world in may 2020 we saw a peak decline of 40 minus 44 percent in intra african exports but intra african exports were on the rebound at least by august in comparison africans exports to the rest of the world only began to see to show some improvements off to september 2020 what this highlights is the importance of further developing competitive and diversified intra african value chains in the future but these must be supported by a strong trade facilitation regime it is further important to note that the coven 19 pandemic is far from over and this graph shows that in the past 10 days at least 50 percent of ships leaving the eastern coast of china were experiencing delays either as a result of virus outbreaks which which led to the closure of ports and congestion or extreme weather conditions and particularly typhoons this is a phenomenon that has been experienced in other developed economies such as in germany and a significantly slowed down global supply chain and to this africa will not be immune therefore it is important for us to continue learning and building from the lessons we learned at the peak of the pandemic last year on the left side of my screen you will see a map detailing the major ports and corridors in southern africa bringing particular attention to the corridor reflected in red the north south corridor which runs from durbin in south africa all the way to daris alarm in tanzania this trade corridor transverses at least three regional economic groups beginning in saku saddak moving into commessa and then finally into the east african community on the right side of my screen you will see a collision of the major trade facilitation response mechanisms taken by the wrecks within southern africa mainly during the peak of the pandemic last year and what one learns from this is that there was general agreement on the facilitation of essential supplies however wrecks took different approaches to things such as air transport cross-border transport operations as well as transit deliveries this posed a particular problem for transporters trying to transverse corridors such as the north south corridor which run through a multiplicity of economic groupings the main lessons we took were firstly from the experience of the citrus growers association representing citrus growers in zimbabwe, eswatini and south africa last year the pandemic saw a boom in supply for southern african citrus due to a decline in the spanish season due to a lack of seasonal workers to harvest the fruit as well as a global increase in demand for health foods such as citrus however the citrus growers association was not supported in its export ambitions and what we saw was that where usually it will take them 228 hours to source and stamp all the necessary exports required documents this time was almost multiplied to 400 hours in some cases a general lack of interdepartmental coordination meant that exporters would reach a port and not be able to find an official from the department of agriculture due to a lack of coordination and working times between the customs office and the department of agriculture office and this was further compounded by port congestion which further saw that in some cases major shipping lines would completely bypass the Cape town port due to delays which at the peak were at about 14 days this made shipping via Cape town impractical these experiences were further echoed on the north south corridor where we saw that there was firstly a lack of access to information due to the lack of involvement of national trade facilitation committees decisions and information were often made at very high level ministerial council meetings of ministers of trade and transport and it sometimes took some time for this information to just be disseminated down to the official at the border post especially where there were changes in regulation the zambian border post was a particular program problem within sadak as the sadak grouping had agreed to only screen drivers on arrival in particularly those in transit whereas the zambian government took a mandate to make compulsory to make it compulsory for truck drivers to have a negative COVID-19 test in order to enter its borders this caused both the safety risk as they were often insufficient or inadequate storage facilities for trucks carrying patrol petroleum products and also a health risk as drivers would spend two to three days at the border post with little to no abolition facilities within a health pandemic what we saw amongst the successes were the pre-clearance arrangements agreed upon between Botswana, South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe as well as that the DRC and Zambia simulated a one-stop border post in order at various times during the pandemic in order to fast track the movement of traffic the sadak concept minister saw the importance of inter-regional cooperation and they began some dialogue with both commesa and the EAC despite not reaching any hard hard core rulings or decisions this signaled a change in thinking particularly within the region there was also the establishment of an online platform which was used to share information on the production and trade of medical equipment and this platform can be used in the future to share other trade related information the AFCFTA builds on the progress of the WTO's trade facilitation agreement of which 37 or 54 African countries are already signatories the AFCFTA by taking a top-down approach to integration can provide the continent with the framework with which states can shape their own reform programs highlighting issues deserving national attention through the obligation for forming matrix the protocol further sets a framework enabling technical and financial cooperation between member states towards trade facilitation reform remembering the high costs of both the reform in hard infrastructure and soft infrastructure the main policy proposals forwarded in this paper included the need to prioritize the formulation of robust trade facilitation committees although 20 are already reported on the continent and the region in particular a major inquiry must be made into the functionality as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic while the peak at least these committees played a very minimal role towards the dissemination of information as well as decision-making and this left decision-making at very high levels and sometimes inaccessible to the private sector we need national trade facilitation committees that have a robust legal backing are independent from the government of the day and are not placed in the back office of some trade related department they must also be significantly financed in order for them to take on the difficult task of sometimes site visits and lastly they must take into consideration the interplay between the private and public sector involving the private sector who often have real-time experiences of the situation of the ground the case of the of citrus growers association showed us the importance of fostering intra-border agency corporation this can be as simple as aligning working hours as well as streamlining procedures and processes so that a simple crate of fruits does not need 228 different export related documents in order to be shipped off we also saw the importance of supporting and building a one-stop border posts and although ATR already built or in the works on the continent there's need for these to be for these to be developed into actual working one-stop border posts and avoid situations as we see many times on the continent for example the Zambian and Zimbabwe Churundi border post where it is a one-stop border post in name but in practice government officials on either side will duplicate the same processes and require the same documentation the AFCFTA can build on the progress made during the pandemic through the championing of digitalization as an ally of trade facilitation which is reflected in the thinking behind article 17 of annex 4 states already began to abandon paper-based systems as a result of the health risks of face-to-face contact however this should not be viewed as a temporary solution to the COVID-19 but should be taken further towards the digitalization of the trade regime in the region lastly as we're seen in the case of the Citrus Growth Association it will be important for the region to invest important infrastructure this is because as global supply chains continue to shift and be threatened by health and weather risks such as typhoons ports within the southern African region must remain viable towards international shipping lines and this can only be done if greater efficiencies are built towards the operation I think I'll end my presentation there and I thank you for your time great wonderful thank you so much very informative presentation highlighting the importance of understanding some of the legal challenges and basic non-tariff barriers to trade there so time is running out so I'm very happy to welcome our final presenter Ivan Manik Ivan has been working with us on the inclusive growth in Mozambique program as a trainee and consultant and well he's going to present a paper co-authored with me on a labor a digital labor market platform and how that has provided some insights into COVID Elina please go ahead greetings from Mozambique I am Ivan Manik and I will be presenting a recent paper by Sam Jones and I in which we investigate the impacts of COVID-19 on informal labor market using data from a digital matching platform in Mozambique to start with some key points it is known that COVID-19 have negatively impacted the economy there is evidence that indicate that more vulnerable households were hardest hit by COVID-19 in Mozambique for instance estimates indicate that consumption poverty may have increased by 10 percentage points due to the pandemic so this evidence indicate that the pandemic have affected especially the most vulnerable sides of the economy in this paper we also aim to analyze the impacts of COVID-19 on a vulnerable side of the economy here we focus on how the crisis has affected supply and demand for informal men were freelancers in Mozambique using data from fish cut labor market matching platforms platforms sorry and we find that basically these admittedly niche market has been resilient and may well have supported adjustment shock so to give a context about COVID-19 and the labor market it is important to recognize that COVID-19 is not just an economy wide negative in my shock it has complex effects on both demand and supply sides of the labor market for instance that is evidence that indicates change changes to composition of demand and the mode of delivery of products in goods due to the pandemic and for instance in Taiwan that is evidence that indicate a shift to online food purchases has cases increase in South Africa for instance also in kandua.com which is a platform similar to fish cut was recorded a huge increase in the number of job requests comparing March 2021 to April 2020 also going to the informal labor services it is important to also acknowledge that this segment of the labor market provide many services and these services are especially important in low income urban settings so in light of this context in this paper we aim to analyze how might COVID-19 affect these markets both on supply and demand side basically we postulate four different channels of impact the first one is fear of infection and here we expect that this channel impacts negatively both supply and demand side of the formal labor market services the second channel is formal business restrictions and for both sides of the informal labor market we expect an ambiguous sign the third channel is reduced mobility and for the supply side here we expect an ambiguous sign and the demand side we expect a positive impact lastly we have the income loss and for this supply side relatively to the income loss we expect a positive impact because basically has people loss lose the incomes basically the the informal labor market may work as a source of extra income to compensate these loss so for the demand side we expect again here an ambiguous impact overall the net effect on this demand and supply side is ultimately an empirical question so this is how Biscata looks like in the online platform Biscata is basically a free-to-use platform and covers around 18 service categories it is location specific and it is available online and also using USSD which means that one do not need a smartphone to use it it has by now 50 000 workers and 30 000 unique clients so using data from this platform we estimate we produce three outcomes of interest that stand for the supply and demand of the informal labor services for the supply we use the change in active registered workers and for the demand we use task contact rate and task agreement rate going to the empirical strategy what we basically formulate is that our outcomes of interest are a function of each of the previously presented impact channels we basically proxy the fear with the number of positive cases we proxy the restriction with the stringency index from oxford we proxy the mobility with work mobility index from google and finally we proxy the income with employment conditions index which is reprivate from retrieved from the national institute's national statistics institute so we include also different controls and fixed effects and we also had in this baseline model unit specific trends specifically linear and quadratic trends furthermore has and robustness robustness exercise we remove unit specific tree trends tree trends and basically what we do is that we detrend our outcome variables and finally we apply an even study framework to analyze the net effects on our outcome variables so going through the results here we present the results for the baseline panel baseline model in this first panel and for the priority training which is our robustness robust specification and what we basically find is that the differences in the results between these two models are not very significant or basically we will say that our results are consistent and we also don't find dramatic differences across different trends so our results are generally robust so interpreting only the baseline model it is possible to see that new cases that stand for the fear are negatively associated with both supply and demand we then find that stringent index is negatively associated with the supply and finally we find that the employment index or employment conditions are also negatively related with the supply and demand and what here these less result indicators that has the employment condition deteriorate people run through the informal labor market has coping crisis coping mechanism here we present the results for the for the event study analysis and the x-axis basically is our event window and here zero basically presents the event date which is where the shock occurs basically our shock is the covid pandemic start of the pandemic in mausoleum and basically what we find here is that right after the shock there is a slight bump that is not different from zero statistically different from zero and then we find a downward trend in the game and upward trend in the number of workers but these uh these dynamics are not different from from zero in many of the periods in the demand side using looking at the agreement rate it is possible to see a significant bump in the agreement rate that is then followed by an upward trend showing that the impact of the covid of covenating was significant and had different dynamics so in which conclusion we get so basically we conclude that consistent with the prior ambiguous impact of the pandemic we find different set of responses operating operating through multiple channels we find that worsening general employment outcomes appear to have pushed the workers into piscat and stimulated demand for informal labor services overall we find a zero net effect previously I showed it and and and on growth of registered workers but a large increase in demand for services and basically because informal services are cheaper or more flexible so although we recognize that piscat but the form is not representative of mausoleum labor market even in urban areas these results have very important implications and one of those is that digital matching platforms can help labor market markets adjust to shanks even in low income settings with low internet views thank you very much great thank you so much we are already over time so unfortunately there won't be a great deal of time for a q&a there are just there's one question in the in the chat but let me just perhaps just highlight a few takeaway points from the presentation so first of all a takeaway for me is the complexity of the covid 19 shock as we saw in terms of both trade in terms of the in both Mozambique and South Africa different sectors were differentially affected with actually harsher effects it seems to be on some of the informal sector second highlight is the need to be able to act rapidly in most in South Africa in particular one could say that that has demonstrated the ability of the state at least to put forward grants and so on that it has obviously come with some significant macroeconomic challenges looking forward a thirdly technology could be a role in Mozambique with the shat platform which is not government it's just a private sector platform was able to support some informal workers find new activity and adjust to the pandemic so i wanted just to end with two quick questions the first is to kudzai there's a question here which says to what extent you foresee that trade happens will change more permanently to the advantage of intraafrican trade and should this is this a is this a good sign thank you i'll begin my my submission by saying i think the the any changes we should foresee or that we can hope for within the intraafrican trade regime should be underpinned by great industrialization so as long as we're able to unlock the different value chains for critical supplies such as in the textiles industry also in the automotive sector we would be hopeful towards such positive changes however as my presentation reflected on there are significant risks particularly towards the cost of trade so as it is right now it's it remains far too expensive to move goods around but once we get the economies of skill right and we create value chains that work for us i think there are lots of positive indicators that were on the right track great thank you so much i think i think um yeah there's some research to be done there on understanding what are the real costs of trade um interregially in sub-saharan africa to really highlight the importance of improved trade facilitation haroon if you wouldn't mind i would like to ask you one question what do you see perhaps looking forward in in south africa do you see that they're income or some kind of more permanent problems uh to support the poor yeah that's a good question sam it's a very timeous one i mean at the moment there's a massive push um uh nationally for what is called the basic income grant i think on on the one hand there's that pressure on the other and of course one looks at the fiscus and the cost of uh universal grant um together with the notion that um uh incentivizing firms and here i mean survivalist firms micro enterprises has been underappreciated as part of the government's toolbox in terms of sort of more sustainable employment generation so i think that may you may see some attention being given to that sort of the the classic supply side economics but one that's targeted towards smaller firms micro firms survivalist firms i don't think that's been sufficiently appreciated um as an armory of policymakers i think it's going to be there's almost um i wouldn't want to say contestation but i think it's those two kinds of big policy options that government's facing at the moment and then you may find a blended version of that emerging for south africa at least great thank you i think i mean we're still thinking the the pandemic in real time and uh and some of the uh policy responses definitely very further into the future to see really which ones were most effective uh not only is it important also as you say it's supporting firms to thrive and avoid the catastrophe of completely global permanent growth of businesses uh unfortunately time is my enemy today and we'll probably close this session uh let me just say thank you so much to our investors from world league and south africa it's been a really excellent session i've learned a lot and as i've said i'm free to get in contact with me and with the presenters if you have any questions i'm sure they'll be glad to respond to your questions and i look forward to seeing you in the press conference so thank you very much to you all and have a great next to the day thank you