O impacto do COVID-19 na elasticidade-preço das importações

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has produced a shock to the world economy, and its restrictive measures have affected international trade, causing supply restrictions and increasing prices. Recent studies show that the price elasticity of Brazilian imports of some products is low, while that of other products is high, which raises doubts about how these products behaved during this external restriction. With this panorama in view, this work seeks to verify which changes occurred in the price elasticity of imports. For this, Brazilian imports, GDP and exchange data were used in order to estimate a function of demand for imports and their price elasticity, and from that to insert two dummies to verify the level break and the break of price. trend. The results identified are that the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the elasticity of products in different ways. For the most part, products with low import price elasticity are products that do not find domestic substitutes, thus showing a structural tendency of the problem, and changes in price elasticity also showed changes in demand due to the pandemic, which have characteristics temporary.