The Potential Impact of COVID-19 on Commonwealth Trade, Recovery and Resilience

The paper adopts a Global Value Chain (GVC) perspective to estimate the intensity of impact of COVID-19 across sectors for all Commonwealth countries. The intensity of the impact was driven by a combination of supply and demand shocks transmitted across different sectors of the economy. Some countries are much more affected than others. The varying impact of the pandemic in some countries suggests that the differences observed between countries have structural causes. The first is the sectoral composition of domestic activity; the second is the exposure to trade in general and GVCs trade in particular. In a second part, the paper delineates the path to sustainable recovery along three stages, some of which have already been set in motion around the world in response to the pandemic