Who benefits from a broad-based stimulus policy?

All countries (the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and China) are implementing a highly expansionary fiscal policy in 2020. This is in principle positive, since each country is benefit ing from other countries’ fiscal stimulus, but this across-the-board stimulus is generat ing winners and losers. The winners are those where the sensitivity of imports to domestic demand stimulus is low (they benefit from stimulus for others and keep most of their own stimulus for themselves); the losers are those where the sensitivity of imports to domestic demand is high (they hardly benefit from their own stimulus, which primarily benefits other countries). We see that concerted fiscal stimulus is then: More positive in China, Spain, the United States and, to a lesser degree, Japan and the United Kingdom; Less positive in Germany, France and Italy.