The Impact of Government Policy Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic and Brexit on the UK Financial Market: A Behavioural Perspective

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, the Governor of the Bank of England, while granting an interview, described the pandemic as an unprecedented economic emergency and said that the Bank could go as far as radical money-printing operations. In reaction, the UK financial market, particularly the FTSE 100 and pound sterling, witnessed record-breaking losses. Considering this evidence, we hypothesized that the emotions and moods of investors towards the financial market might have been impacted by the information they obtained from frequent government policy announcements. Furthermore, we proposed that the United Kingdom's final exit from the European Union (Brexit), which coincided with the pandemic, could have worsened the outlook of the UK financial market, as investors began to diversify their portfolios. Consequently, we examined the impact of government's policy announcements on investors' reactions to the concurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic and Brexit. Our findings reveal that the psychology of investors during the pandemic was significantly shaped by frequent policy announcements, which in turn affected overall market behaviour.

Social assistance and food security during covid-19 pandemic lock-down: Insights from Nigeria

Nigeria, a fast-growing country, has been food insecure prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. Local agricultural production cannot satisfy it’s ever-growing population’s food and nutrition needs. This state was aggravated by the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown which the government adopted to stem the spread of the virus. To cushion the effects of the lockdown, social assistance of diverse forms from varying sources were supplied. This study assesses the effect of the lockdown order on household food security level, and the coping strategies that were adopted. Also, it examines the kinds of social assistance received and how such mitigated food insecurity status among households that benefitted. The study uses used a secondary dataset from the Nigeria COVID-19 National Longitudinal Phone Survey. The National Bureau of Statistics collected the data in March, June, and July, targeting periods before, during, and when the lockdown was gradually eased, respectively. The results revealed that most households experienced different forms of shock during the lockdown, notably increases in food prices and disruption of farm activities. Furthermore, only a few households received social assistance, main from state governments and religious bodies. The assistance received had a positive effect on household food security during the lockdown period. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee the future of food journal (FOFJ), Witzenhausen, Germany. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).