This paper contributes to several related strands of the literature. Recently published volumes such as Baldwin and di Mauro (2020) have reviewed the range of emerging policy responses to COVID-19 and provided advice on how policy frameworks should evolve – although most of the focus has been on high-income economies and China. Authors such as Cororaton and Rosen (2020), Granja et al. (2020), De Marco (2020), Kozeniauskas et al. (2020), and Cui et al. (2020) have focused on the reach and targeting of specific programs in China, Italy, Portugal, and the United States. Additionally, this paper contributes to the emerging literature by authors including Chetty et al. (2020), Granja et al. (2020), and Cui et al. (2020) that have provided some early evidence on the effectiveness of programs to help firms weather the impacts of the pandemic in the same countries, as well as previous studies such as De Mel et al. (2012) and Bruhn (2020) that focused on experimental and quasi-experimental evidence from previous crises in Sri Lanka and Mexico.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows. The next section presents the data. The following two sections present policies that have been announced, including evidence on access to policies, as well as policies that firms identify as more needed. Then, we present evidence on mismatches between the demand and supply of policies, mistargeting, and barriers to accessing public support. Recognizing that the COVID-19 crisis has significantly altered firms’ outlook and heightened uncertainty (Altig et al., 2020), the section that follows specifically focuses on the relationship between receiving policy support and firms’ expectations and uncertainty. Lastly, we present some preliminary evidence about the effectiveness of different policies. The paper concludes with a discussion of policy implications and directions for future research.

# **2. Data**

We rely on data from the first wave of the Business Pulse Surveys (BPS) developed by the World Bank Group (WBG) to measure the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the private sector (ApedoAmah et al., 2020), as well as the COVID-19 follow-up rounds of the World Bank Enterprise Surveys.<sup>2</sup> This novel harmonized data set offers the most comprehensive assessment of the short-term impact of the shock (from April through August 2020). The sample includes more than 120,000 businesses in 60 low-, middle-, and high-income countries in the six regions where the WBG is present.<sup>3</sup> The sample covers micro, small, medium, and large businesses across all main sectors (agriculture, manufacturing, retail, and other services, including construction).

The questionnaire collects information on business performance through the COVID-19 shock on some critical economic dimensions: operations of the business, sales, liquidity and insolvency, labor adjustments, firms’ responses, and expectations and uncertainty about the future (Apedo-Amah et al., 2020). Businesses are asked about their preferred mechanisms of support during the pandemic. We grouped these mechanisms in the following categories of policy instruments: monetary transfers, deferral of payments, access to finance, support with tax obligations, wage subsidies, and others.<sup>4</sup> Businesses are also surveyed on whether they have received any of these mechanisms of support

> 2Source: Enterprise Surveys, The World Bank, http://www.enterprisesurveys.org.

> 3The survey covers East Asia and Pacific (EAP), Europe and Central Asia (ECA), Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Middle East and North-Africa (MNA), South Asia (SAR), and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Among high-income countries, our data set includes Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia. 4The menu of policies differed in some countries, but in most cases, options can be harmonized in these categories.

3