October 3, 2020 — From early on in this pandemic, a common reaction has been “at least, maybe now we will get serious about addressing climate change.” One can see the logic. The terrible toll taken by Covid-19 should remind us of the importance of three things: the need for science, the role for public policy, and the usefulness of international cooperation. With these three revelations firmly in mind, we can see that we also need them to respond to the problem of climate change.
August 3, 2020 — The Covid-19 pandemic has had differentiated impacts across countries. This is true even among the set of Emerging Market and Developing Economies (EMDEs), which share the disadvantages of more poverty, less adequate health care, and fewer jobs that can be done remotely, compared to Advanced Economies.
Differentiation across continents
Surprisingly, the rates of infection and death have so far been lower in most EMDEs than in the US and Europe, as pointed out by Pinelopi Goldberg and Tristan Reed, and by Raghuram Rajan. Undercounting is undoubtedly massive, however. Furthermore, the situation is evolving rapidly.
May 3, 2020 — “Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it.” And the rest of us are condemned to repeat George Santayana.
Will the Coronavirus Recession of 2020 be V-shaped? Or U-shaped? If we fail to heed the lessons of history it is likely to be W-shaped, with incipient recovery followed by successive relapses into sickness and recession.
As has been widely noted, we would have been better prepared to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic in the first place if everyone had paid more attention to the past history of epidemics. Be that as it may, the world is now deep into the pandemic and its economic consequences, the most severe such events since the interwar period, 1918-1939. As decision-makers in every country contemplate their next steps, they would do well to ponder the precedents of that interwar period.