COVID-19: poverty has led to greater welfare loss than ill health in many low-income countries

Global welfare has taken a turn for the worse in the age of COVID, with both health and income levels under threat. Francisco Ferreira, Olivier Sterck, Daniel Gerszon Mahler, and Benoit Decerf estimate the worldwide mortality and poverty generated by the pandemic and compare these two sources of welfare losses by expressing them in a common metric: years of human life. Their analysis shows that for most poor and middle-income countries, greater economic deprivation has been a more important source of loss in well-being than premature death.