Our first activity after the lock down due to the Covid-19 pandemic turned out to be an online-meeting (teams-meeting) with the Deputy Director of WIFO, Professor Ulrike Famira-Mühlberger, PhD, and Senior Economist for Macroeconomics and European Economic Policy, Stefan Schiman, Msc on 17 September 2020. The topic of the meeting was "Economic and Social Consequences of Covid-19 Pandemic". WIFO (Austrian Institute for Economic Research) is Austria's leading institute for applied empirical economic research. WIFO acts as a national contact point for international institutions like the IMF, OECD, EC as well as for international rating agencies (Moody's, Standard&Poors, etc.) concerning national economic developments and the effects of economic policy measures. WIFO perceives its core task as serving as a bridge between basic academic research and economic policy applications that is built on a foundation of careful empirical analysis. There is no other facility in Austria that performs this task to any comparable scope or in a similar manner. 

Professor Famira-Mühlberger, PhD, gave an introduction in the form of a PPP,  outlining the activities of the institute with it's 120 employees, out of them 65 scientists. The presentation was followed by an overview of Stefan Schiman concerning Covid-19 and the consequences for the current state of the economy in Europe and in the region. He gave an overview concerning the enormous downturn of the economy in the first half of 2020. Topics were the debt development, reduction in the production especially in the car industry. The severe problems in tourism were highlighted as well. Other issues were unemployment, short-time work and home working. One of the very few growth areas is the IT sector.

The presentations were followed by a Q&A session.