Daily archives: 30. March 2021

2 posts

Globalization and Pandemics

Pol Antràs, Stephen J. Redding, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg: Globalization and Pandemics, in. NBER Working Paper Series, Working Paper No. 27840 (September 2020). The authors develop a model of human interaction to analyze the relationship between globalization and pandemics. Their framework provides joint microfoundations for the gravity equation for international trade and the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model of disease dynamics. The authors show that there are cross-country epidemiological externalities, such that whether a global pandemic breaks out depends critically on the disease environment in the country with the highest rates of domestic infection.

Health inequality and the 1918 influenza in South Africa

Johan Fourie, Jonathan Jayes: Health inequality and the 1918 influenza in South Africa, in: CAGE Online Working Paper Series No. 532 (January 2021), pp. 1-35. The 1918 influenza – the “Spanish flu” – killed an estimated 6% of South Africans. Not all were equally affected. Mortality rates were particularly high in districts with a large share of black and coloured residents. To investigate why this happened, the authors transcribed 39,482 death certificates from the Cape Province.