The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Tunisian Economy : Have Industrial Exports Been Resilient?

This paper attempts to study to what extent Tunisian industrial exports have been resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this purpose, we test for structural breaks using the Bai-Perron test and monthly data on industrial exports from 2014 to 2021. Using the dynamic ordinary least squares method, we show that the structural break detected during the pandemic has a negative but insignificant impact on industrial exports, implying that the latter has proven resilient against the global health crisis. Also, our empirical findings reveal that industrial exports are positively impacted by investment in totally exporting industries and negatively impacted by the real effective exchange rate in the long run. The exposure of the Tunisian economy to three other pandemics, namely unrest, political instability, and populism, as well as the role of competition policy in boosting exports, are also discussed in this paper