Open AccessLoss of Employment, Lockdown Measures and Government Responses in Malaysia during the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Note
Author(s) -
Muzafar Shah Habibullah,
Mohd Yusof Saari,
Sugiharso Safuan,
Badariah Haji Din,
Anuar Shah Bali Mahomed
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
international journal of business and society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.236
H-Index - 15
ISSN - 1511-6670
DOI - 10.33736/ijbs.4320.2021
Subject(s) - cointegration , covid-19 , government (linguistics) , distributed lag , pandemic , short run , econometrics , economics , job loss , demographic economics , unemployment , macroeconomics , medicine , outbreak , linguistics , philosophy , disease , pathology , virology , infectious disease (medical specialty)
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.