SHS (Humanities and Social Sciences) - Mesurer la vulnérabilité des entreprises des pays en développement au choc du Covid-19 Measuring the vulnerability of developing countries' firms to Covid-19

The objective of this research project is to develop a synthetic indicator to measure the effects of the COVID-19 shock and the lockdown of a large part of the world on enterprises in developing countries.The aim is to provide public decision-makers with means to identify the most vulnerable firms and those with the greatest ability to impact the rest of the economy. This information will make it possible to better target public aid, given the scarcity of resources in most of these countries. The project will also assess the structural consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economies of developing countries, particularly in terms of intersectoral reallocation. The approach developed in this research is tested using Tunisian data, then the analysis is extended to other African and Asian countries for which business survey data are available. The objective of this research project is to develop a synthetic indicator to measure the effects of the COVID-19 shock and in particular the containment of a large part of the world on firms in developing countries. As a first step, we aim to give public policy makers the means to identify the most vulnerable firms and those with the greatest ability to influence the rest of the economy. This will help to better target public aid, given the scarcity of resources in most of these countries. Due to the non-existence of unemployment benefits and limited social protection, the effects on companies are almost entirely transmitted to households. In a second step, we aim to assess the structural consequences of the COVID- 19 pandemic on the economies of developing countries, particularly in terms of intersectoral reallocation. The approach developed in this research is tested using Tunisian data, and the analysis is then extended to other African countries for which we will have data from company surveys. The originality of our approach consists in developing a multidimensional index of firms' vulnerability to the COVID-19 shock and in identifying the determining dimensions and the weight of each factor. In addition, we will examine the effects of CPVID-19 on a sectoral basis, which will allow us to highlight the long-term structural implications (recomposition of the economy). On the other hand, part of our analysis takes Tunisia, an emerging North African country, as a case study. Finally, our originality also lies in the fact that we will construct our indicator from standardised data, which will allow us to apply our analysis of the vulnerability of enterprises to COVID-19 to other developing countries. We will be interested in countries with similar levels of development to Tunisia, in South Asia for example, as well as countries or less developed countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The developed index will take into account supply-side effects due to lack of access to firms, markets and inputs. The first effects depend on the propensity to telework in the sector in question and the investment of firms in digitisation of their operations and other logistical capacities for supply and delivery. A key factor in the difficulties of upstream and downstream access is integration into global value chains. The capacity of business continuity plans depends on access to cash, especially if heavy investment is required to adapt or redirect the business (e.g. a clothing factory that starts producing masks or a hotel that turns into a clinic). An index measuring the feasibility of teleworking by professions will be used to assess the impact of containment on businesses, on the demand side. The global bottlenecks affect not only the supply side but also the demand side of Tunisian companies participating in global supply chains. To separate the effect of the export demand shock from other effects such as those of the supply shock or the fall in domestic demand, we exploit the change in the volume of imports of 6-digit products of the Harmonized System nomenclature code of destination countries. Monthly exports by destination and by product category supplied by the customs of destination countries allow us to take into account the recent effects of the health crisis. The methodology consists of constructing an index based on business surveys, econometric analysis, input-output matrices and possibly factor analysis techniques to check the robustness of the index to the method of aggregating its components.