The impact of corona crisis on the economies of major metropolitan areas

The article presents the results of an operational assessment of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the change in the gross urban product (GUP) in 17 metropolitan areas of Russia with a population of more than 1 million people in 2020. The goal of the authors was to try to answer the most actual questions nowadays (early 2021): how deep was the fall of the largest agglomerations economies in Russia and abroad; did the corona crisis have a more negative impact on the largest metropolitan areas then on the rest of the economy? In order to answer these questions, two main tasks were: 1) to assess GUP in 17 largest metropolitan areas of Russia; 2) to consider foreign estimates of the GUP in 2020. For foreign comparisons, the authors use the first published data on changes in GDP and gross urban/regional product in the United States, Canada and Australia. The assessment of GUP in this work is carried out through the assessment of the component of employee compensation and then the transition to the GUP indicator on the assumption that such a ratio of compensation of employees to GDP in a city equals the average of the said ratios for the 17 metropolitan areas. The assessment showed that the real GDP growth rates in 2020 were negative not in all metropolitan areas, and in most of them economic losses turned out to be less than those of the Russian economy as a whole.