Studies have shown that women are disadvantaged when facing infectious disease outbreaks. This study uses descriptive data analysis, causality, and VAR modeling to verify this hypothesis in the case of COVID-19 in Belgium in relation to people's mobility. The results confirm this women's disadvantage hypothesis, in particular among the working-age population in Belgium. This disadvantage is explained by women's greater mobility during the pandemic. Despite the restrictions on nonessential travel imposed by Belgian authorities, women use public transportation more often than men to travel for work and family reasons and are thus more likely to be exposed to the virus. Therefore, it is necessary that the health, economic, and social response provided by the Belgian authorities correct this inequality.

The increase in the amount of commercial papers and the real estate price boom before the 2007-2008 crisis witness a preference for speculative assets by banks. In contrast, after the crisis, banks tended to opt for safe assets, and especially during the Eurozone debt crisis with a sharp increase in deposit facilities from July 2011 to December 2011. This credit allocation can be at the detriment of productive assets; therefore, it can affect the real economy. This paper analyzes empirically the credit allocation of monetary and financial institutions in countries of the European Union over the period 1997-2013. Our results show that risk aversion stands as a main explanation of balance sheet movements. If risk aversion is largely influenced by monetary policy before the crisis, risk perception is uncorrelated to monetary policy afterwards.

This paper has two objectives: to characterize the exposure of developing countries to the international income, prices and monetary shocks and to calculate the social well-being in the period of contagion. Firstly, we develop a theoretical model with a world composed of two countries (developed and developing countries) and measure the level of the exposure of income in developing country to the external shocks trough external trade, international tourism, migrant transfers, external debt, foreign aid, FDI and other private financial flow channels. And, we characterize imported inflation in studying the effect of the international shocks on real exchange rate. Secondly, we search the social well-being. The results suggest that economic disequilibrium in developing country is socially optimal and that the dependence of its income to the domestic industry is necessary to reduce contagion. This conclusion is important for African countries because they import finished products for the households' consumption. In these conditions, they are exposed to the imported inflation. The domestic monetary and tax policies are not adapted to fight against inflation. Also, they produce and export raw materials essentially toward industrialized economies. Thus, they must develop the domestic industry in order to influence the demand (or prices) of raw materials and to substitute imports by domestic goods in period of hyper-inflation in advanced economies in order to reduce imported inflation.

RésuméNous proposons un modèle à deux pays : un pays en développement exportateur de matières premières et importateur de produits finis, et une économie avancée. Les tests individuels réalisés sur 16 pays africains entre 1970 et 2007 montrent que la variation des échanges commerciaux de ces pays suite aux chocs de revenu et de prix internationaux provoque celle de leurs revenus, en fonction de leurs spécialisations et de leurs politiques publiques. Les pays de l'échantillon doivent diversifier leurs économies en produisant les biens et services consommés localement afin de réduire leurs niveaux d'exposition.AbstractWe propose a two countries model: a developing country that exports raw materials and imports finished products and a developed country. We test this model in 16 African countries between 1970 and 2007 and show that the variation in commercial flows caused by international income and price shocks entails a variation in their incomes, depending on the specialization and public policies. The countries of the sample must diversify their economies in producing goods and services consumed locally in order to reduce their levels of exposure.