![]() ![]() The Small Business Administration (SBA)–administered program provided loans to small businesses through banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions with the goal of keeping small businesses open and retaining employees on the payroll (Fairlie & Fossen, 2021). In the USA, the largest program providing funds to small businesses is the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) with a volume of $650 billion during the early stages of the pandemic (Bhutta et al., 2020). Governments throughout the world responded with support initiatives. In the long term, the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to become a cleansing process and a large reallocation shock (Caballero and Hammour, 1991) for firms of different sizes and industries. In the UK, the unemployment rate surged to its highest level since 2017 as the pandemic continued to affect jobs (Thomas, 2020). The number of working business owners in the United States plummeted from 15.0 million in February 2020 to 11.7 million two months later in April” (Fairlie, 2020). ![]() A survey conducted by the Connected Commerce Council of more than 5016 European small and medium-sized businesses carried out in November–December 2020 found that practically all SMEs were affected, with an average 20% decrease in sales and a 16% decrease in customer base (Digitally Driven, 2021).īarrero et al., ( 2020: 17) demonstrate for the USA that, “temporary layoffs and furloughs account for 77% of gross staffing reductions in the first months of crises in the United States,” while the Financial Times ( 2020) reports that, “more than 3 m Americans filed for first-time unemployment benefits during a first week of May 2020, taking the number of applications for the first three months of the lockdown to 33.5 million. Small firms in hospitality, retail, personal services, entertainment, and the arts were most affected (Bartik et al., 2020). Therefore, COVID-19 directly affected self-employed individuals more than employed individuals (Kritikos et al., 2020) and small businesses more than large businesses, both in Europe and the USA (Digitally Driven, 2020, 2021).Ī survey conducted by NBER of more than 5800 small businesses in the USA found that 43% of small firms were expected to be closed by December 2020 (Bartik et al., 2020). At the same time, the social distancing guidelines, taken to contain the virus, affected the service sector in particular, an area where physical proximity often matters and a sector that depends more on micro and small businesses than the manufacturing sector. It has already taken a death toll of almost four million people worldwide, as of the end of June 2021 (Worldometers, 2021). First, it threatens millions of people’s lives all over the world. The COVID-19 pandemic presents an unprecedented challenge in many ways. Several authors demonstrate that the Spanish flu pandemic gave way to new businesses, with start-ups booming from 1919 in the middle of the pandemic onward (Beach et al., 2020 Karlsson et al., 2014). In the USA and Europe, businesses were forced to shut down because so many employees were sick. The enforcement of various restrictions varied across the cities and countries: the New York City Health Commissioner, for example, ordered businesses to open and close on staggered shifts to avoid overcrowding on the subway (, 2020). While it infected 500 million people-about a third of the world’s population at the time-it killed between 20 and 50 million people across four successive waves, including some 675,000 Americans (, 2020). The Spanish flu affected most of Europe and the USA in 1918. It also increased political instability and social disparity, with the city’s poor being hit hardest by the pandemic, while the wealthier used their savings and resources to relocate from pandemic-impacted cities and reduce their interactions with the community (Economist, 2021). While the epidemic wiped out at least 3% of Parisians in the first month, it would contribute to an industrial revolution in France. For example, the epidemic in the early 1830s, when France (and other parts of central Europe) was hit hard by cholera with hospitals overwhelmed by patients whose ailments doctors could not explain (O'Sullivan, 2021). ![]() Epidemics and pandemics do not just come and go, they impact the economy and society. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |