VoxEU Webcast
India's Lockdown
On 24 March 2020, the government of India ordered a nationwide lockdown of 1.3 billion people for 21 days as a preventive measure against COVID-19. Given what we know of the epidemic, it is difficult to quarrel with the prescription of social distancing and lockdown, when accompanied by state measures that provide adequate economic protection, but what happens in countries where the state is unable to provide the necessary back-up welfare measures? Debraj Ray (NYU) and Lore Vandewalle (IHEID) discuss the ideas presented in the CEPR Policy Insight they recently authored (together with Sreenivasan Subramanian). Download the paper here
