Special Issue: Policy Responses to the impacts of COVID‐19 pandemic on Asia

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply influenced the social and economic activities of countries around the world. As countries in Asia play key roles in the global supply chain and their economic development is a crucial driving force of the world economy, it is important to better understand how their economies are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and their policy responses to such impacts. In this issue, we assemble five papers studying relevant topics: the effect of Taiwan's Triple Stimulus Vouchers; the impact of Korea's COVID-19 stimulus payments on sales of local small businesses; the ability of the global fear index based on COVID-19 pandemic and government policy responses; the predictive power of the stock market return for the real economic growth with respect to COVID-19 pandemic; and the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on international currency markets. The lead paper, written by Hua, Peng, and Yang, evaluates the economic benefits of revitali-zation vouchers during the COVID-19 pandemic using Taiwan's Triple Stimulus Vouchers as an example. The paper finds that the stimulus policy has positive benefits by (a) inducing con-sumers to use revitalized triple vouchers, (b) boosting consumer confidence, (c) helping increase the economic growth rate from 0.1173% to 0.2156%, and (d) significantly influencing the service industry. The second paper, written by Choi, examines how sales of local small businesses can be promoted through COVID-19 stimulus payments in Korea. The paper finds that the stimulus payments led to significant increases in card spending in establishments accepting local currency relative to other establishments. While the estimated spending effect of the stimulus payments among groceries, furniture, and beauty sectors is larger, sectors such as restaurants, leisure, and travel experiencing substantial sales losses do not gain much from the stimulus payments. This suggests that targeting sectors that are the most severely affected can be a more effective policy measure in terms of alleviating the gaps in COVID-19-induced economic losses across sectors. The third paper, written by Kathuria and Kumar, examines the ability of the global fear index (GFI), based on the COVID-19 pandemic and government policy responses, as a measure of uncertainty in predicting eight Indian rupee-based exchange rate return series. The paper adopts the wild bootstrap likelihood ratio introduced by Kim and Shamsuddin (2020) to test the predictability of daily Indian rupee-based exchange rate return series. The results reveal GFI as an insignificant determinant of Indian rupee-based exchange rate return series. However,