A Comprehensive Measure of Lifeyears Lost due to COVID‐19 in 2020: A Comparison across Countries and with Past Disasters
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Author | Vu Nguyen Doan,Ilan Noy |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12957 |
A Comprehensive Measure of Lifeyears Lost
due to COVID-19 in2020: A Comparison
across Countries and with Past Disasters
Vu Nguyen Doan
University of Finance - Marketing
Ilan Noy
Victoria University of Wellington
Abstract
Typically, disaster damages are measured separately in four dimensions: fatalities, injuries, dislocations, and the financial dam-
age that they wreak. Noy (2016) developed a lifeyears index of disaster damage which aggregates these disparate measures.
Here, we use this lifeyears index to assess the costs of the COVID-19 pandemic across countries and compare these costs to
the average annual costs of all other disasters that have occurred in all countries in the past 20 years. We find that the costs
of the pandemic, measured for 2020, far outweigh the annual costs associated with other disasters in the past two decades. It
is the economic loss that dominates this impact. The human and social implications of this economic loss are plausibly much
greater than the direct toll in mortality and morbidity in almost all countries. Finally, it is small countries like the Maldives and
Guyana that have experienced the most dramatic and painful crisis, largely under the radar of the world’s attention. Our con-
clusion from these findings is not that governments’policy reactions were unwarranted. If anything, we find that the loss of
lifeyears is correlated positively across the three dimensions we examine. Countries that experienced a deeper health crisis
also experienced a deeper economic one.
1.Measuring disaster impacts
Typically, disaster damages are measured separately along
several dimensions: The number of fatalities and injuries
they cause, the number of people otherwise affected, and
the financial damage that they wreak. When trying to evalu-
ate the global burden of disasters, aggregating these dis-
parate measures into a comprehensive index is challenging;
but without an aggregate measure, a fuller picture of the
burden of disasters over time and across countries is diffi-
cult to discern.
The usual approach to obtain this aggregate measure has
been to attach a dollar value to mortality and morbidity,
using the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL), and sum these
together with the monetary assessment of damage to public
and private infrastructure. The VSL approach makes compar-
ison across countries very difficult, as different governments
use very different values for (statistical) life, and any attempt
to identify a unitary value cannot fit either domestic policy
priorities or public perceptions. More importantly, many
people are generally uncomfortable with this approach,
which explains why governments are typically very discreet
about the VSL ‘prices’they use in their policy making pro-
cesses.
As an alternative to the VSL approach, Noy (2016) devel-
oped a lifeyears index of disaster damage. This lifeyears
index, in contrast to the VSL approach, aggregates the vari-
ous ways in which years of life were lost to all members of
a society because of a shock, such as an earthquake, or a
pandemic.
In this paper, we use the lifeyears index to assess the
costs of the COVID-19 pandemic across countries and com-
pare these costs to the average annual costs of all other dis-
asters that have occurred in all countries in the past
20 years(2000–2019). It will surprise no one, we think, to
realise that the costs of the pandemic, measured only for
2020 (and excluding any predicted costs for 2021), far out-
weigh the average annual costs associated with all other
disasters aggregated together.
To date, there have been attempts at projecting the
economic costs of the pandemic using data from before
the pandemic (e.g., Noy et al., 2020), estimating the cross-
country economic costs with econometric modelling (e.g.,
Chudik et al., 2020), or focusing on specific countries with
more detailed general equilibrium modelling (e.g., Martin
et al., 2020; Walmsley et al., 2021). Another strand has
emphasised that these economic costs will possibly last
for a long time (Koslowski et al., 2020). But none of these
projects had tried to assess the costs the world has
already experienced, summed over their differing dimen-
sions, and compared across countries and regions. This is
our intent.
Global Policy (2021) 12:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12957©2021 Durham University and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 12 . Issue 4 . September 2021553
Policy Insights
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