URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Fall_2020_Melissa-McCarthy

Michael DiNardi Assistant Professor Economics

of May 2020, datasets showed a noticeable uptick in people leaving their homes. “There’s about a two-week lag in cases,” said DiNardi. “So in March, about two weeks after people started staying home, the number of cases started to decline, which suggests that people staying at home really helped.” As the country continues to grapple with COVID-19, DiNardi hopes to expand on his initial research and analyze new GPS data, as well as data from the labor market, to better understand how the pandemic impacts people differently based on factors like race or socioeconomic class. GLOBAL PANDEMIC, GLOBAL RESPONSE Long after the immediate trauma of COVID-19 passes, the impacts of the pandemic will still be reverberating on a global scale. As Assistant Professor Brendan Mark of the URI Department of Political Science began to untangle the repercussions of the pandemic on international relations, human rights, the economy, and conflict, two questions drove his work: How bad is this going to be? And whom among us are most vulnerable to suffering long-term consequences of this crisis?

“The data shows that following the state of emergency declaration in March, Rhode Islanders were taking this pandemic seriously.”

- Michael DiNardi

“The economic impacts of this are going to be massive on a global scale,” said Mark. “They are going to define our generation. The economy is going to shrink by 4.4 percent according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which is worse than what we experienced during the 2008 financial crisis. We may see 400 million full-time jobs erased globally.” According to Professor Mark, poverty, which has been declining every year in the 21st century will now increase for the first time, with approximately 100 million extra people in extreme poverty due to the pandemic. This is likely to impact underdeveloped countries and vulnerable groups such as minorities, women, and disabled people the most.

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