Much of the attention from COVID-19 has been on the impacts on tourism and other service sectors; but there has been a growing interest in some agricultural and food topics, such as the decline in food away from home (FAFH) expenditures. Our work considers the importance of FAFH in the overall economy, and we also consider changes in agricultural production and trade that have occurred because of COVID-19. We gather data on actual changes to these components, as well as similar shocks to non-agricultural sectors, and employ a simulation model to estimate the impacts on gross domestic product (GDP). Results indicate that changes from agriculture due to COVID-19 have had a larger effect on the overall U.S. economy than the share of agriculture in the economy at the beginning of COVID-19. But the non-agricultural shocks still outweigh the impacts from agriculture by a magnitude of 3. Breaking the results down along the components, we find that the loss in FAFH expenditures is the largest contributor to the change in GDP resulting from shocks to agricultural markets and conclude that agricultural production/trade markets have been very resilient during the pandemic. Our results also indicate that our model (computable general equilibrium) does reasonably well in estimating GDP compared to actual changes due to the inclusion of data on actual demand, supply, and fiscal responses to COVID-19.

中文翻译：

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农业在经济中的重要性：COVID-19 的影响。

COVID-19 的大部分注意力集中在对旅游业和其他服务业的影响上；但人们对一些农业和食品话题越来越感兴趣，例如外出食品（FAFH）支出的下降。我们的工作考虑了 FAFH 在整体经济中的重要性，我们还考虑了因 COVID-19 而发生的农业生产和贸易的变化。我们收集这些组成部分的实际变化以及对非农业部门的类似冲击的数据，并采用模拟模型来估计对国内生产总值（GDP）的影响。结果表明，COVID-19 造成的农业变化对美国整体经济的影响比 COVID-19 初期农业在经济中所占的比例更大。但非农业冲击仍然比农业冲击大3倍。将结果按组成部分细分，我们发现FAFH支出的损失是农业市场冲击和GDP变化的最大贡献者。得出的结论是，农业生产/贸易市场在大流行期间非常有弹性。我们的结果还表明，由于包含了有关实际需求、供给和对 COVID-19 的财政反应的数据，我们的模型（可计算一般均衡）在估算 GDP 与实际变化方面表现相当不错。