Extreme Outlier: The Pandemic’s Unprecedented Shock to Tourism

Latin American and Caribbean countries are among the most dependent in the world on the tourism sector. A recent publication from Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) economist's Henry Mooney and María Alejandra Zegarra: “Extreme Outlier: The Pandemic’s Unprecedented Shock to Tourism in Latin America and the Caribbean,” develops a new global measure of economic dependence on tourism—the Tourism Dependency Index—to illustrate the extreme reliance of many Latin American and Caribbean countries on the sector. Using shock simulations, the authors highlight how potentially damaging the shock could be for output, employment and the balance of international payments across the region. In this podcast, hosted by Golda Lee Bruce, Caribbean Country Department Development Storyteller, Mooney and Zegarra emphasize that COVID-19 represents an unprecedented extreme outlier event, and government efforts to protect the sector and their citizens must be equally unparalleled. To learn more about this topic and the publication visit: https://blogs.iadb.org/caribbean-dev-trends/en/extreme-outlier-the-pandemics-unprecedented-shock-to-tourism-in-latin-america-and-the-caribbean/ . And explore more content from our work in the Caribbean region: https://devtrends.iadb.org/en .