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Exactly one year ago, the quarantine announced in Lithuania suddenly put the country’s businesses on its shoulders and led the government to unleash the bag of borrowed money and begin unprecedented distributions of support to businesses and residents.
The country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has fallen, the budget deficit has increased, millions for business support and millions for the purchase of vaccines. We have heard a lot in recent years. And the most important of them would be one: the cost of this pandemic.
So how much could the COVID-19 crisis, which has affected the whole world, already cost Lithuania, and how much more?
123RF.com nuotr./Pinigai
The cost of a pandemic is in the billions
Measuring losses for the financial year can be difficult. It is even more difficult to quantify the losses from the strange “pandemic year” that began in March, as it began in mid-March, and the different funding of the tools used by the two governments poses additional challenges.
But at least a very crude attempt can be made to do so.
15 minutes interviewed Sigismund Mauricas, an economist at Luminor, said he would use the indicator of budget deficit and lost GDP growth to gauge the price of the pandemic. He stressed that the comparison of this last indicator should not be with the level before the crisis, but with the growth that would have occurred without the pandemic.
Luke April / 15min photo / Sigismund Mauricas
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