Wuhan coronavirus spread in Russia: macroeconomic production function in regard to transport and communication infrastructure

Transport and communication infrastructure plays an important role in ensuring economic growth, also in the context of the Wuhan coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) spread worldwide. The role of the communication component increases with the epidemic and the associated restrictive measures, which replace, to a certain extent, the transport component. We offer an econometric study of the macroeconomic production function in the Russian Federation with transport and communication infrastructure (the fixed assets average annual value of the Russian transport and communications sectors) for 1990–2018. The arguments for this function are the average annual value of fixed assets in constant 1990 prices, the average annual rate of the use of production capacities in Russian industry, the average annual number of people employed in the national economy, the average annual value of fixed assets of transport and communications in constant 1990 prices. Our research demonstrates that in 2010–2018 the GDP elasticity to production infrastructure was decreasing. We explain this by the reduction in the volume of capital investments in the infrastructure sector’s fixed assets. In addition, we offer an analytical modification of the macroeconomic production function for 2020 in the context of the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus among the Russian population by introducing into this function the average annual rates of labor and infrastructure capacity use, which, along with the average annual rate of fixed assets capacity use are functions of the predicted values of the daily number of the infected Russian citizens. These predicted values are calculated by the time dependent Gaussian quadratic exponent estimated by the least squares. We present the accuracy of the forecast results for the 2020 spring trends of the daily number of Russian and Moscow population infected with the Wuhan coronavirus. The average APE forecast error for 30 days ahead for Russia is 10.4% and the same for five weeks for Moscow is 10%. Moreover, we make forecasts of the officially published daily number of infected Russian population for fall 2020 – spring 2021.