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This survey presents the recent and rapidly expanding literature, which analyses the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, by means of Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) modelling. It does so not only by contrasting and assessing the different methodological approaches, and the key findings of the simulation exercises, but also by putting the various contributions in a historical perspective. This is necessary because each CGE-based study should be evaluated while keeping in mind when it was realised, since questions, priorities, expectations have been constantly changing during the spreading of the pandemic.

South Asia is one of the world's poorest regions. In this chapter we use a representative household model of South Asia to explore the potential impacts of regional trade liberalization under the auspices of SAFTA on both the distribution of economic gains across the countries of South Asia, and across various groups within South Asia. We also discuss the underlying theory of a potential extension to our approach.

Computable general equilibrium, or CGE, is a well-established numerical simulation technique for evaluating the economy-wide effects of changes in an economic system. It has become very widely used throughout the economics discipline, but is perhaps employed most frequently in the analysis of changes in international trade policy, where changes in tariffs and other taxes are often large and almost always involve multiple sectors and/or regions simultaneously. CGE methods, while certainly not without their limitations, have proved very effective at tracking the myriad of feedback and flow-through effects associated with new regional trading agreements and multilateral trade reforms, and have provided a consistent mechanism of analyzing the effects of changes in trade policy and related areas on a diverse range of economic outcomes.

Most current modeling approaches identify very small gains from trade reform. In this chapter, we examine recent developments in the literature to assess whether standard modeling approaches are mis-specifying, understating, or overstating the gains from trade reform. Key areas where the impacts of trade barrier reduction appear to be understated include the measurement of barriers; the aggregation of these barriers; process productivity gains, particularly those resulting from reallocation of resources between firms; product quality improvements and expansion of product variety; factor supply; and investment of gains from trade.