COVID-19 Credit Policies around the World: Size, Scope, Costs, and Consequences

Abstract

Governments deployed credit policies on a historically unprecedented scale in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We estimate the effective size of credit policies for seven large advanced economies in terms of the incremental resources provided to firms and households—a measure that allows aggregation across credit support, forbearance, and traditional fiscal policies but that does not appear in traditional government statistics. These estimates are used to reassess the absolute and relative size of different governments' policy interventions and to evaluate whether taking credit policies into account can help explain the cross section of macroeconomic outcomes. Incremental resources increase from an average 14.5 percent of 2020 GDP when only fiscal policies are considered to 22 percent of 2020 GDP when credit policies are also taken into account. Incorporating credit policies also reduces the cross-country variation in the total size of policy interventions. With regard to fiscal cost, fair value estimates for these credit support programs average 37 percent of principal, with wide variation depending on program features. We also discuss several related measurement issues, the financial regulatory changes that accommodated these programs, the pros and cons of the different types of credit policies, and how in principle budgetary costs should be calculated versus how governments account for credit policies in practice.