Introduction
While the whole world shares the broad outlines of the economic and social repercussions of the Coronavirus (COVID-19), which are unprecedented in its recent history, the implications thereof for each country are linked to the nature of each country’s economic system, its ability to withstand the entailed repercussions and the speed of its recovery.
In light of the need to study the sectoral implications of these repercussions in order to address the crisis properly, the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies (ECES), in its initiative, is producing a set of daily reports entitled “Views on Crisis”. The reports aim to analyze the implications of the coronavirus crisis for Egypt in relation to a number of vital production and service sectors and to key macroeconomic variables. This ECES initiative comes from the belief that the current critical conditions require directing state’s efforts towards achieving two main goals: providing a decent life for Egyptians during the crisis and in the recovery phase, preserving the existing investments-especially domestic investments- and helping to overcome the crisis and prepare for a rapid launch with the gradual decline of the crisis and recovery of the global economy.
The methodology used in these reports is based on an analysis of the supply and demand shocks associated with the crisis cycle in its various stages. Given the lack of detailed data on the sectoral impact of the crisis, the sectoral analysis is based on logical assumptions related to the nature of each sector and the degree of sector vulnerability to previous sever crises that were certainly less severe than the current crisis and different in nature. However, it is a starting point for the urgently required scientific diligence at this stage.
