THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC ECONOMIC COSTS IN TERMS OF LABOUR FORCE LOSS

ABSTRACT

Within a broader context of economic costs of the recent pandemic we calculate the excess deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic over the whole population and split them into age subgroups. Further, we estimate the cost of the labor force lost due to the pandemic. We employ a general additive model to set up a counterfactual time series of weekly deaths to count the number of deaths if the pandemic did not occur. Subtracting counterfactual series from the actual number of fatalities provides us with the excess deaths. The amount of excess deaths in the whole population is not statistically different from the COVID-19 victims reported by the Ministry of Health. However, we find excess deaths that are substantially higher than the reported COVID-19 causalities in the age group from 35 to 59 years. We estimated the costs of the lost labor force to be approximately 0.03% of the Czech 2021 GDP.