Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Scarlet Chen, Paul Mizen, Pawel Smietanka
The spread of COVID-19 has created an important new source of concern for firms. This column reports the findings of the latest Decision Maker Panel survey of UK CFOs, which show that businesses expected the spread of the virus to have a large impact on their sales over the next year. The impacts on sales were expected to be material across all sectors, but businesses in accommodation and food, leisure and transport services expected to be most severely impacted. The survey also suggests that COVID-19 is now a more important source of uncertainty than Brexit for most UK businesses.
