Poverty and Income Distribution Incidence of the COVID-19 Outbreak: Investigating Socially Responsible Policy Alternatives for Turkey

The COVID-19 pandemic is being experienced as a multidimensional systemic crisis based on the simultaneous manifestations of the supply, demand, and financial shocks. These effects have already been realized in the exacerbation of deep inequalities in income distribution, in functional, regional, and gender terms; and therefore, in an environment where poverty is experienced with social exclusion due to severe inequalities of income. Within that context, this article has three interrelated objectives. First, we measure the macroeconomic impacts of COVID-19 for the Turkish economy through a general equilibrium model designed for this purpose. Second, we examine the effects of the crisis on poverty and income distribution specifically based on official data from Survey of Income and Living Conditions (SILC). Finally, based on our empirical findings, we develop socially responsible policy alternatives to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19 crisis on the Turkish economy.