On the economic impacts of COVID‐19: A text mining literature analysis

• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Author: Hugo S. Gonçalves,Sérgio Moro
• Date: 01 February 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/rode.12931

REGULAR ARTICLE

On the economic impacts of COVID-19: A text

mining literature analysis

Hugo S. Gonçalves

1

| Sérgio Moro

2

1

Faculty of Economics, University of

Algarve, Faro, Portugal

2

Instituto Universit

ario de Lisboa

(ISCTE-IUL), ISTAR, Lisbon, Portugal

Correspondence

Hugo S. Gonçalves, Faculty of

Economics, University of Algarve,

Faro, Portugal.

Email: hugogonc@gmail.com

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak has affected everyday lives

worldwide. As governments started to implement confine-

ment and business closure measures, the economic impact

was felt by entire societies immediately. The urgency of

such a theme has led researchers to study the phenome-

non. Accordingly, the purpose of this research is to provide

the state of the art on relevant dimensions and hot

topics of research to understand the economic impacts of

COVID-19. In this survey, we conduct a text mining analy-

sis of 301 articles published during 2020 which analyzed

such economic impacts. By defining a set of relevant

dimensions grounded on existing literature, we were able

to extract a set of coherent topics that aggregate the

collected articles, characterized by the predominance of a

few sets of dimensions. We found that the impact on

“financial markets”was widely studied, especially in

relation to Asia. Next, we found a more diverse range

of themes analyzed in Europe, from “government

measures”to “macroeconomic variables.”We also dis-

covered that America has not received the same

degree of attention, and “institutions,”“Africa,”or

“other pandemics”were studied less. We anticipate

that future res earch will prol iferate focusi ng on

several themes, from environmental issues to the

effectiveness of government measures.

KEYWORDS

coronavirus outbreak, COVID-19 pandemic, economic impact,

literature analysis, text mining

Received: 9 February 2022 Revised: 12 July 2022 Accepted: 12 August 2022

DOI: 10.1111/rode.12931

Rev Dev Econ. 2023;27:375–394. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/rode © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 375

JEL CLASSIFICATION

E20, E60, F40, I15

1|INTRODUCTION

The outbreak of COVID-19 and its quick proliferation across the globe has changed daily life

routines, causing unexpected and severe impacts in all sectors of the world economy. This pan-

demic resulted in a global recession, and its extensiveness is comparable only to the two world

wars and the Great Depression (Susskind & Vines, 2020). It is estimated that real gross domestic

product (GDP) worldwide declined 4.3% in 2020 and, while the forecast for 2021 shows an

increase of 4.0% (World Bank, 2021), there is significant uncertainty about economic recovery.

To limit the quick spread of the pandemic in a context of uncertainty and concern, govern-

ments have enacted harsh containment measures (Piccinelli, Moro, & Rita, 2021). The main

goal was to avoid overwhelming healthcare systems by flattening the growing curve of infec-

tions to reduce both the number of infected people and fatalities, holding back for the develop-

ment of viable vaccines and treatments (Thunström, Newbold, Finnoff, Ashworth, &

Shogren, 2020). The lack of knowledge led to unorganized implementation of several different

governmental policies with different levels of restrictions to cope with peaks and troughs of

infected citizens over time (Sharma, Talan, & Jain, 2020). Those policies include limiting citi-

zens’mobility by requiring social distancing, lockdowns or business closures, and health mea-

sures such as diagnostic tests and quarantine for infected citizens. Containment measures are,

on the one hand, crucial to halt the spread of the COVID-19 disease; however, on the other

hand, those measures have large economic costs in the short-run. The coronavirus outbreak

affected the world economy severely by increasing unemployment and decreasing GDP, stock

prices, and interest rates (Barro, Ursúa, & Weng, 2020), with the containment measures

resulting in a deceleration of the economic activity in multiple sectors, such as industrial pro-

duction, trade, or tourism (Deb, Furceri, Ostry, & Tawk, 2020).

At this stage, after more than 2 years since the World Health Organization declared the pan-

demic, it is very important to ascertain the economic impacts of COVID-19. Although this is a

novel topic, its importance already resulted in a significant body of literature, which is deemed

relevant to assess and take a first insightful view of scholars' perspectives on the economic impact

of the pandemic. Such trends can be observed in other fields where literature analyses are already

being published, such as in supply chain management (e.g., Magableh, 2021;Queiroz,Ivanov,

Dolgui, & Wamba, 2020). Following on this vein, our study conducts a literature analysis to deter-

mine the state of the art in the field of economics. We conduct a semi-automated literature analy-

sis of 301 published studies on the economic impact of COVID-19 by using a text mining and

topic modeling approach (Moro, Pires, Rita, & Cortez, 2019) to understand the hot research

topics, future paths of research, as well as the emphasis of most recent and prominent works rela-

tively on economic variables, economic impacts, regions, institutions, and economic modeling

(see, among others, Barrero, Bloom, & Davis, 2020; Eichenbaum, Rebelo, & Trabandt, 2020;

Sharma et al., 2020). Accordingly, this paper contributes to the existing literature concerning the

economic impacts of COVID-19 in the following ways: (1) given the recent focus on determining

such economic impacts, a set of papers focusing on this thematic are queried and extracted

through an automatic method, allowingto scrutinize a large number of papers and also to provide

a first perspective on academic production trends, (2) since those papers are classified on a range

376 GONÇALVES AND MORO