Efektivitas Tanggapan Pemerintah Kota Medan dalam Menanggulangi Dampak Pandemi Covid-19 Sektor Ekonomi 2020-2022

Abstract

Since December 2019, COVID-19 has become a global pandemic, quickly spreading to more than 200 countries around the world. Changing people's behavior is a must to contain and reduce the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The positive case of COVID-19 in North Sumatra was first detected on March 18, 2020, in the city of Medan. As of September 23, 2020, North Sumatra had reported 9,653 positive cases, ranking seventh in Indonesia. Because of this, not a few of the business sectors in Medan City were forced to go out of business or at least reduce the amount of production by terminating employees due to decreased business turnover in Medan City due to the implementation of social restrictions. To answer this challenge, the Medan City Government issued a number of policies for the recovery of the economic sector, especially for affected medium-sized, small, and microbusiness actors, such as establishing a Medan City Government assisted business program in which business activists will receive incentives in the form of several programs, including capital assistance, digital training, and help buying products for foster business actors. This research will describe how the Medan City Government responds to economic recovery, especially for the small and micro-enterprise sector, considering that the business sector absorbs 97 percent of the workforce in Indonesia which makes it a contributor to growth for the national economy. The researchers discovered that the Medan city government was quite responsive in assisting business people in the city of Medan by using a descriptive qualitative research method.