COVID-19 Lockdown, Family Migration and Unemployment in a Gendered Society − A Trade-Theoretic Analysis

COVID-19 has posed severe challenges not only to researchers in the field of medicines and natural sciences but also to policymakers. Almost all nations of the world lockdown have been chosen as an immediate response to this pandemic crisis. Given that the labour market in India continues to be gendered with gender-based wage differentials besides occupational segregation, women who are the marginalized section in the society bear the brunt of the unprecedented COVID-19 lockdown. Against this backdrop, a multi-sectoral general equilibrium model has been constructed with heterogeneity in the pattern of migration (i.e., with and without family migration) that has been derived from the intra-household bargaining problem among unskilled families to analyze the gendered effect of the pandemic. Lockdown has been conceptualized as a government-controlled exogenous policy instrument to restrict human mobility in the contact-intensive economic activities which have multi-dimensional effects in the form of adverse-supply shock (high transaction cost), restricted use of labour, adverse demand shock and a high psychological cost on unskilled labour which caused distress among the urban migrant workers. A family-based migration equilibrium has been derived that generalizes the conventional Harris-Todaro (1970) and Chandra and Khan (1993) migration equilibrium. The results of the paper reflect internal contradictions of developing economies that have a conditional-conditioning relationship with an archaic structure.