Marcella Alsan, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, Minjeong Joyce Kim, Stefanie Stantcheva, David Y. Yang: Civil Liberties in Times of Crisis, in: NBER Working Paper Series, Working Paper Nr. 27972 (October 2020). Civil liberties are sometimes considered non-tradable and “sacred,” and their protection a hallmark of democracies. Using representative surveys of 480,000 respondents from 15 countries, the Authors found that citizens demonstrate a clear willingness to trade off civil liberties for improved public health conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Social & Economic Affairs
34 posts
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.
World Bank Group (ed.): Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020: Reversals of Fortune. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020. The Poverty and Shared Prosperity series provides a global audience with the latest and most accurate estimates on trends in global poverty and shared prosperity. For more than two decades, extreme poverty was steadily declining. Now, for the first time in a generation, the quest to end poverty has suffered its worst setback.
UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner (Hg:): Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Looking back to look ahead: A rights-based approach to social protection in the post-COVID-19 economic recovery, September 11, 2020.
Andy Sumner, Chris Hoy, and Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez: Estimates of the impact of COVID-19 on global poverty, in: WIDER Working Paper 2020/43, Aprril 2020. In this paper the authors make estimates of the potential short-term economic impact of COVID-19 on global monetary poverty through contractions in per capita household income or consumption. Their estimates are based on three scenarios: low, medium, and high global contractions of 5, 10, and 20 per cent; they calculate the impact of each of these scenarios on the poverty headcount using the international poverty lines of US$ 1.90, US$ 3.20 and US$ 5.50 per day. Our […]
Davide Furceri, Prakash Loungani, Jonathan D. Ostry and Pietro Pizzuto: Will Covid-19 affect inequality? Evidence from past pandemics, in: CEPR Press, Issue 12, Mai 1, 2020, p. 138-157. This paper provides evidence on the impact of major epidemics from the past two decades on income distribution. The authors’ results justify the concern that the current pandemic could end up exerting a significant impact on inequality: past events of this kind, even though much smaller in scale, have led to increases in the Gini coefficient, raised the income shares of higher income deciles, and lowered the employment-to-population ratio for those with […]
Loretta J. Mester: Payments and the Pandemic. Keynote Speech: 20th Anniversary Chicago Payments Symposium – Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, September 23, 2020. In her keynote speech, Loretta J. Mester, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, discussed the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic on the US payments industry. In order to address the payment traffic problems associated with the pandemic, the FedNow real-time payment system should be developed, to which every US citizen and company should be connected. Mester also advocates the introduction of a digital currency by the central banks.
Vellore Arthi, John Parman: Disease, Downturns, and Wellbeing, Economic History and the Long-run Impacts of COVID-19, in: NBER Working Paper Series, Working Paper 27805, September 2020. In their work, Vellore Arthi and John Parman ask how COVID-19 could affect human capital and well-being in the long term. They observed severe consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. For them, this public health crisis and the accompanying economic downturn seems to dwarf the scale, scope and destructive power of most modern pandemics. Since knowledge about other modern pandemics is largely limited to short-term effects, recent experience may do little to help predict and […]
Guido Alfani: Epidemics, inequality and poverty in preindustrial and early industrial times, in: IIEP-WP-2020-16 (August 2020). This paper is part of a symposium organized by Dr. Remi Jedwab of George Washington University that will be published in the Journal of Economic Literature. Recent research has examined the distributive consequences of major historical epidemics. The current crisis triggered by Covid-19 prompted the author to look at the past to gain insights into how pandemics can affect inequalities in income, wealth and health. The fourteenth-century Black Death, which is usually believed to have led to a significant reduction in economic inequality, has […]
A literature review of the economic aspects of COVID-19 Abel Brodeur, David Gray, Anik Islam, Suraiya Jabeen Bhuiyan: A Literature Review of the Economics of COVID-19, in: IZA DP No. 13411 (June 2020). With their contribution, the authors aim to provide an overview of the newly published and rapidly growing literature on the economic consequences of Covid-19 and government reactions, and to summarize the findings of a very large number of studies. In this survey they provide: (a) an overview of the data sets used to measure social distancing and Covid-19 cases and deaths; (b) a review of the literature […]
Jordà Òscar, Sanjay R. Singh, Alan M. Taylor: Longer-Run Economic Consequences of Pandemics, in: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper 2020-09 (June 2020). The authors ask how major pandemics affect economic activity in the medium to longer term and whether the effects are consistent with what economic theory suggests. Since pandemics are rare events, they collected historical evidence from many centuries. The authors have examined asset returns using a dataset dating back to the 14th century, focusing on 12 major pandemics in which more than 100,000 people died. They also included major armed conflicts, which claimed a similar […]
Deficit spending as in war financing? Harold James: COVID-19, debt monetization, and lessons from war financing, Webinar at the Bendheim Center for Finance, Princeton University, April 24, 2020. To combat the economic consequences of COVID-19 pandemic, the governments of the USA, the European Union and other countries in the transatlantic region have mobilised trillions of dollars. Massive subsidies, grants and loans as well as massive economic stimulus packages are intended to halt or at least cushion the crash of the global economy. The resources mobilized by governments and central banks to combat the global crisis of 2008/2009 are already far […]
Boston Consulting Group: BCG Perspectives. COVID-19. Facts, scenarios, and actions for leaders. Publication #2 with a focus on: Preparing for the restart, 20 April 2020. Table of content: 1. COVID-19 Context and Development: Disease progression, health care system capacity, and response Government policies and action. 2. Economic response. Scenarios and key drivers. Business impact. 3. Guide for leaders: Determining government action. Considering ecosystem interdependencies. Navigating businesses through the crisis.
International Monetary Fund (IMF): World Economic Outlook, April 2020, Chapter 1: The Great Lockdown. This is the first serious analysis and forecast of the economic consequences of the current fight against the Covid-19 pandemic. According to it, the global economy will shrink in 2020 much more than in the last crisis in 2008/2009. The most developed regions and countries of the capitalist world system will be particularly affected.