Loss of Employment, Lockdown Measures and Government Responses in Malaysia during the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Note

Authors

  • Muzafar Shah Habibullah Putra Business School Malaysia
  • Mohd Yusof Saari EIS-UPMCS Centre for Future Labour Market Studies, PERKESO
  • Sugiharso Safuan Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Indonesia
  • Badariah Haji Din College of Law, Government and International Studies, Universiti Utara Malaysia
  • Anuar Shah Bali Mahomed School of Business and Economics, Universiti Putra Malaysia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33736/ijbs.4320.2021

Keywords:

Labour market, Loss of employment, Lockdown, ARDL, Malaysia

Abstract

In this paper, we use daily administrative data from January 25, 2020 to December 31, 2020 to examine the relationship between job losses and the Malaysian lockdown measures. The Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach is used to estimate both the long-run and short-run models. The results of the Bounds F-test for cointegration reveal that there is a long-run link between job losses and the Malaysian government lockdown measures (both linear and non-linear). The positive association between job loss and lockdown measures shows that as the lockdown gets tighter, more people will lose their jobs. However, as time passes, especially in conjunction with the government stimulus package programmes, job losses decrease.

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Published

2021-12-17

How to Cite

Muzafar Shah Habibullah, Mohd Yusof Saari, Sugiharso Safuan, Badariah Haji Din, & Anuar Shah Bali Mahomed. (2021). Loss of Employment, Lockdown Measures and Government Responses in Malaysia during the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Note. International Journal of Business and Society, 22(3), 1525–1549. https://doi.org/10.33736/ijbs.4320.2021