The impact of the Ebola outbreak on firms in Liberia

Most of the estimates of the economic impact of Ebola have been either anecdotal or top-down using national accounts. We do not yet have survey data on how individual firms are being hit by the epidemic and how they are responding, including the effect on workers and the orientation of the firms themselves to potentially new business opportunities. We propose collecting data from firms in Liberia so as to be able to inform the Liberian government on the nature of the impact of the outbreak. We will use pre-existing surveys and recipients, partnering with the NGO Building Markets, so as to be able to measure the difference in activity before and after the crisis, and stratify the sample by more and less impacted parts of the countries.