Long-Run and Short-Run Relationships Between Covid-19 and the Loss of Employment in Malaysia: Evidence Using GARCH-M, EGARCH-M and PGARCH-M Models

The purpose of the present paper is to investigate the long-run and short-run relationships between the loss of employment and the Covid-19 pandemic in Malaysia’s labour market. The Covid-19 measures in-clude the number of Covid-19 new cases, the number of Covid-19 new deaths, the number of total Covid-19 cases and the Covid-19 fear index. Using cointegration analysis, we found that the loss of employment exhibit long-run relationships with the four Covid-19 measures. Our short-run analysis using the PGARCH-M model able to captures the volatility and clustering of the variability in the loss of employment. The PGARCH-M model shows evidence of the leverage effects or asymmetric effects which suggest that the positive shocks (good news) increase volatility in the loss of employment, more than the negative shocks (bad news) in a crisis situation. © 2022,Revista Portuguesa de Estudos Regionais.All Rights Reserved

LOSS OF EMPLOYMENT, LOCKDOWN MEASURES AND GOVERNMENT RESPONSES IN MALAYSIA DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: A NOTE

In this paper, we use daily administrative data from January 25, 2020 to December 31, 2020 to examine the relationship between job losses and the Malaysian lockdown measures. The Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach is used to estimate both the long-run and short-run models. The results of the Bounds F-test for cointegration reveal that there is a long-run link between job losses and the Malaysian government lockdown measures (both linear and non-linear). The positive association between job loss and lockdown measures shows that as the lockdown gets tighter, more people will lose their jobs. However, as time passes, especially in conjunction with the government stimulus package programmes, job losses decrease.

Labour market reactions to lockdown measures during the COVID-19 pandemic in Malaysia: An empirical note

In this empirical note, we examine the relationship between the loss of employment and lockdown measures undertaken by the Malaysian government during the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak over the period from 25 January 2020 to 10 September 2020. By using cointegration analysis, our results suggest that there are both long-run and short-run relationships between loss of employment and lockdown measures in Malaysia. Lockdown measures show positive impact on the number of workers who lost their jobs during the pandemic. The loss of employment increases by 0.35% to 1.1% for every 1% increase in the lockdown measures. © 2021 Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. All rights reserved.