Pathology

Business

International trade

Archaeology

International economics

Work (physics)

Sample (material)

Disease

Bilateral trade

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Demographic economics

Infectious disease (medical specialty)

Pandemic

Outbreak

Engineering

China

Virology

Economics

Geography

Chemistry

2019-20 coronavirus outbreak

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)

Chromatography

Medicine

Mechanical engineering

Gravity model of trade

World Economy

Using a gravity-like approach, we study how COVID-19 deaths and lockdown policies affected countries' imports from China during 2020. We find that a country's own COVID-19 deaths and lockdowns significantly reduced its imports from China, suggesting that the negative demand effects prevailed over the negative supply effects of the pandemic. On the contrary, COVID-19 deaths in the main trading partners of a country (excluding China) induce more imports from China, partially offsetting countries' own effects. The net effect of moving from the pre-pandemic situation to another where the main variables are evaluated at their 2020 mean is, on average, a reduction of nearly 10% in imports from China. There is also significant heterogeneity. For example, the negative own effects of the pandemic vanish when we restrict the sample to medical goods and are significantly mitigated for products with a high 'work-from-home' share or a high contract intensity for products exported under processing trade and for capital goods. We also find that deaths and lockdowns in previous months tend to increase current imports from China, partially offsetting the contemporaneous trade loss, suggesting that trade is not simply 'destroyed,' but partially 'postponed'.

The trade impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic