The Impact of Covid on Macroeconomic Factors: A Global Study

In 2019, COVID-19, a global threat, exploited international travel and economic links. Declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, governments implemented impactful measures. This paper tries to analyze the effect of the macroeconomic factors such as Foreign Direct Investment, Population Growth, Oil rents (% of GDP), Total Reserves (includes gold, current US$), Official Exchange Rate (LCU), Total Unemployment (% of total labor force) (national estimate), Net Trade in Goods (BoP, current US$), Manufacturing, value added (% of GDP), and Real Interest Rate (%), on the GDP per capita, globally in the pre- COVID-19 and during COVID-19 periods. The results were derived for a total of 207 countries for a substantial amount of time period, i.e., 2008- 2018 as a pre- COVID-19 era and the complete time period of COVID-19’s existence affecting the economies worldwide from 2019-2022. With such substantial data, some interesting results has been found, showing that the same factors which weresignificant in the pre- COVID-19 period were mostly not so influential on the people’s income generating capacity during the covid times. The study empirically explores potential explanations for these changes and proposes avenues for future research.