Impact of a Hypothetical Infectious Disease Outbreak on US Exports and Export-Based Jobs

Bambery, Zoe; Cassell, Cynthia H.; Bunnell, Rebecca E.; Roy, Kakoli; Ahmed, Zara; Payne, Rebecca L.; Meltzer, Martin I.

To calculate the potential economic impacts of an outbreak in the countries in our scenario, we used an upper (16.3%) and a lower estimate (3.3%) of outbreak-related percentage reductions in GDP. The upper estimate was derived from the 2016 World Bank report that provides estimates of the economic impact on the 3 West African countries (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea) that experienced the majority of Ebola cases 3, 11 (Table 2) . We derived this percentage decline in GDP by using as a numerator the estimated outbreak-related GDP dollar loss of $2.2 billion in 2015 (approximately 1 year after the onset of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa) ( Table 2) . As the denominator, we used a GDP value of $13.5 billion, totaled for all 3 countries (Table 2 ). This latter value is the estimated GDP for those 3 countries if the Ebola outbreak had not occurred. Per country values for these estimates are provided in Table 2 . These declines in GDP were not even across all sectors of the affected countries. For example, the biggest Ebola-related declines in Liberia were seen in agriculture, mining, and services. Each of these sectors experienced more than 50% reduction in GDP growth, and together they accounted for approximately 95% reduction in GDP (Appendix Table 1 , supplementary material: http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/suppl/10.1089/hs .2017.0052).