On September 23, 2020, Prof. Kohei Kawaguchi of the Department of Economics attended a morning conference call at the Cabinet Office of Japan to advise Mr. Yasutoshi Nishimura, Minister of State for Economic and Fiscal Policy, who is in charge of Japan's coronavirus response among other duties, on the business environment in light of the COVID-19 shocks in Japan. Prof. Kawaguchi conducted a series of surveys of small businesses in Japan about their response to the pandemic and, with his co-authors, wrote a paper titled "Small Business under the COVID-19 Crisis: Expected Short- and Medium-Run Effects of Anti-Contagion and Economic Policies". The talk presented estimates of the damage to small businesses of the emergency state declaration and the effectiveness of subsidies on firm survival. In the call, Kohei stressed the importance of real-time data analysis and urged the government to establish an organization that can systematically collect, monitor, and analyze data to support evidence-based policy making. You can read the paper here:  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3634544

Photo by Thor Alvis on Unsplash

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