# COVID-19's Impact on International Trade
## 3 Results
### Trade Balance Sensitivity to Product Prices  
The left column of Figure 5 shows the sensitivity \(dB_{c}/d\delta\) of the country trade balance \(B_{c}\) to a price increase of a group of products \(p=0\), \(3\), and \(7\) from Table 1; the right column of Figure 5 gives the variation of sensitivity \(\Delta dB_{c}/d\delta=(dB_{c}/d\delta)^{(2020)}-(dB_{c}/d\delta)^{(2018)}\) between the years 2018 and 2020.  
For _food and live animals_ (\(p=0\) in Table 1), the largest positive balance sensitivities \(dB_{c}/d\delta\) are found for South and Central America, especially (in ascending order, for Argentina with \(dB_{\rm AR}/d\delta\simeq 0.1\), Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, and Uruguay with \(dB_{\rm DY}/d\delta\simeq 0.04\)), as well as New Zealand (\(dB_{\rm NZ}/d\delta\simeq 0.05\)) and Ukraine (\(dB_{\rm UA}/d\delta\simeq 0.04\)), whereas the largest negative balance sensitivities \(dB_{c}/d\delta\) are found for Japan (\(dB_{\rm IP}/d\delta\simeq-0.08\)), Arabian Peninsula countries (such as Saudi Arabia with \(dB_{\rm SA}/d\delta\simeq-0.06\), Kuwait, Iraq and Oman with \(dB_{\rm OM}/d\delta\simeq-0.04\)), and Russia and China with \(dB_{\rm RU}/d\delta\simeq dB_{\rm CN}/d\delta\simeq-0.03\). The former (latter) set of countries would have benefited from (been disadvantaged by) a price or a volume exchange increase of _food and live animals_. We attribute the variation of the sensitivity \(\Delta dB_{c}/d\delta\) to COVID-19, which induced a positive increase of the balance trade sensitivity for Oman, Iraq, Iran and Kazakhstan and a negative decrease for Thailand, Egypt and Jordan.  
For _mineral fuels, lubricants and related materials_ (\(p=3\) in Table 1), the largest positive balance sensitivities are found (in descending order) for Saudi Arabia (\(dB_{\rm SA}/d\delta\simeq 0.12\)), Iraq, Russia, Kuwait, Qatar, Kazakhstan, Iran, Azerbaijan and the UAE (\(dB_{\rm AE}/d\delta\simeq 0.53\)) which are world-leading petroleum and gas producers. In contrast, the negative sensitivities are at the least equal to \(-0.047\) for Australia and are distributed mostly over all countries which are not major oil and petroleum exporters. The largest positive variations \(\Delta dB_{c}/d\delta\) are obtained, among the large countries, for Australia, India and Egypt, which are attributed to a reduction of petroleum imports due to COVID-19's reduction of production. The largest negative variation \(\Delta dB_{c}/d\delta\) is for Iran, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia, which suffered from a reduction in petroleum demand.  
For _machinery and transport equipment_ (\(p=7\) in Table 1), the largest positive balance sensitivities are obtained (in descending order) for Japan (\(dB_{\rm IP}/d\delta\simeq 0.11\)), South Korea, Vietnam and China (\(dB_{\rm CN}/d\delta\simeq 0.052\)); the largest negative values are obtained (in ascending order) for Congo (\(dB_{\rm CG}/d\delta\simeq-0.085\)), Argentina, Cyprus, Russia and Iran (\(dB_{\rm IR}/d\delta\simeq-0.051\)). We also observe a positive relative sensitivity to _machinery and transport equipment_ for European countries. Many of these countries in addition to India and South Korea have a negative variation of sensitivity due to COVID-19.  
For the convenience of readers, the geographical distribution of the trade balance sensitivity obtained from the ImportRank and ExportRank is also given in Appendix A (see Figure A2). We do not discuss here this figure, since as explained above this approach is less informative.