What is the international economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic? Does development aid to Africa reduce migration to Europe? How much indirect employment do investments in private hospitals generate? How could countries in the Middle East and North Africa get more youth and women into jobs? Does introducing anti-abuse provisions into bilateral tax treaties increase tax revenues for developing countries? These are examples of questions our international economists could answer for you.

Our economists have extensive experience with researching economic growth, employment, fiscal policy, monetary policy and international trade.

SEO has many years of experience building economic models to calculate the direct and indirect economic effects of negative or positive economic ‘shocks’ to a specific sector in a specific country. A negative shock could for example be the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdown measures. A positive shock could be, for instance, a major infrastructure investment, a new subsidy, or a tax reform. Such investments or policy changes not only have direct effects on output and employment in the sector concerned, but also have multiplier effects on other sectors that supply goods and services to the concerned sector. Using our models, we can quantify the magnitude of these indirect effects for a large number of countries. Such predictions can be used as input for our cost-benefit analyses (pre-intervention) and our evaluations (post-intervention). An example of the latter is our evaluation of specific IFC investments in India.

SEO also has extensive expertise with analysing international flows such as trade, investment, and migration. For example, we have developed a global trade model that can predict the economic impact by country and by sector of policies that affect trade costs (such as lockdowns, changes in import tariffs, or the cancellation or initiation of bilateral trade agreements). By combining SEO’s global trade model with our macroeconomic and labor market models, our economists can estimate the direct and indirect impact of such policies on trade, investment, GDP, and employment in each sector of an economy. We also have developed a similar global migration model to compute the impact of economic policies on international migration flows.