Patrick Barrett, Jacques Poot (p)

Louafi Bouzouina

Among all OECD countries, aggregate COVID-19-related deaths per million population are in New Zealand the lowest, or at least among the lowest (depending on the measure used). This outcome is generally attributed to strict but effective public health measures that included – besides very high vaccination rates – national and regional lockdowns, as well as total closure of the border except for returning citizens (who were subject to mandatory quarantining). Concurrent fiscal and monetary polices contributed to economic outcomes that remained remarkably buoyant during the two years of the pandemic. One contributing factor has been that the cessation of outbound business travel, tourism and emigration mostly offset the negative impact of near-zero in-bound population flows. It has been generally accepted that New Zealand’s small population scale, low population density and remote location contributed to persistently low productivity growth in the long run – despite decades of economic policies that provide favourable conditions for entrepreneurship and economic growth. This paper argues, using a range of data sources and documented evidence on the impact of covid-related public health and economic policies, that the unfavourable economic geography of New Zealand has actually been of great benefit during the pandemic. The paper concludes that the pandemic years in Aotearoa New Zealand provide a counterfactual to the broad consensus that small scale, low density and remoteness contribute to worse economic outcomes and lower wellbeing.

Louafi Bouzouina (p), Karima Kourtit (p), Peter Nijkamp

Jacques Poot

To limit the spread of Covid-19, most countries in the world have put in place measures which restrict mobility. The co-presence of several people in the same place of work, shopping, leisure, or transport is considered a favourable vector for the transmission of the virus. However, this hypothesis remains to be verified in the light of the daily data available since the first wave of contamination. Does immobility reduce the spread of Covid-19 pandemics? Does mobility contribute to the increase in the number of infections? This paper applies several Pooled Mean Group–Autoregressive Distributed Lag (PMG-ARDL) models to investigate the impact of immobility and daily mobility activities on the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in the European countries using daily data for the period 12 March 2020 to 31 August 2021. The results of the PMG-ARDL models show that immobility and higher temperatures play a significant role in reducing the Covid-19 pandemic. The increase in mobility activities (grocery, retail, use of transit) is also positively associated with the number of new Covid-19 cases. The Granger test of causality shows that the relationship between mobility and Covid-19 goes in both directions, with the exception of grocery shopping and commuting mobility. The former favours the spread of Covid-19, while the latter has no causal relationship with Covid-19.