The Economics of Pandemics: Exploring Globally Shared Experiences

This book offers a lively account of the humanitarian, economic, societal, and planetwide impacts of the pandemics, the COVID-19 pandemic included, which are traced back to as early as the 14th century plague pandemic. Placing the pandemics along with other globally shared resources, such as global warming, AI singularity, and high-risk physics experiments, each of the nine chapters of the book discusses the global health crises from a variety of unique standpoints, including infectious diseases, economics, governance, and public health. Based on the historical records of past pandemics and the rich data from the COVID-19 pandemic, a conceptual framework is presented for the economics of pandemics as a globally shared experience. This book aims to critically examine salient features in the global responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, including global governance, lockdowns, radical movements, and mRNA vaccines. The book will be a valuable resource to students, researchers, and policymakers who are working in the fields of environmental economics, global-scale public goods, and health economics. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Digitalization in the Global Stock Market in the Post Coronavirus Era

The stock market began to play a significant role in the lives of billions of people over the past decades, including as a result of the arrival of a mass investor. Digitalization and the introduction of new digital technologies into everyday life have played a significant role in this development. Thanks to them, the universal and transparent rules of the game and the openness of most of the national stock markets, international investment and diversification, including by geography, are gaining spread. The coronavirus also had some impact on the global stock market in 2020–2021, but this impact was very limited. The aim of this work is to identify the main factors of digitalization in the global stock market in the post-coronavirus period. As a result of this work, it was concluded that, from a historical point of view, the link between the stock market and the real economy is gradually but steadily weakening. This leads to an increase in the speculative component in the pricing of traded assets, primarily shares. In total, it is precisely this weakening of the connection between the stock market and the activities of the companies behind their own shares, as well as the development of information technologies and the growth in the number of small and private investors, that in the long term are the factors determining the basic trends of digitalization. The paper proposes specific promising directions for the development of digital solutions in the global stock market. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Humanitarian management strategy for interstate movement of migrant workers in India during COVID-19 pandemic: an optimization based approach.

India faced a unique situation during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic when millions of migrant workers, in different states had to be transported to their home states as workplaces shut down. The governments in respective states faced challenges of minimizing economic impact while ensuring that the risk of infection was also kept under control. This paper develops models based on various secondary data from governmental and relevant non-governmental sources, trying to minimize the economic impact while keeping the rate of infection low and determining whether the migrant workforce should be allowed to stay in their workplace state or allowed to return to their home state. We found that the number of days of lockdown had a significant impact on the results. Fewer days of lockdown resulted in workers remaining in their work state as the preferred outcome, while a higher number of days of lockdown implied that people traveled to their home state and remain there. The proportion of workers who were willing to return to their work state played an important role on the results too. Beyond the threshold percentages of migrant workers returning to their work state, it became optimal for the government to encourage the workers to travel to their home state. However, this was mostly visible for moderate number of lockdown days as the effects on results were dominated by the impact from the number of lockdown days for too high or too low number of lockdown days. There is also an important trade-off between the budget and infection rate 'R' for the governments to consider. Minimizing the risk of infection requires an additional budget.

The consequences of COVID-19 on older adults: evidence from the SHARE Corona Survey

The COVID-19 pandemic is revealing itself to be much more than a health crisis: it is becoming an economic and social one as well. Some segments of the population are more affected than others from the detrimental economic troubles brought about by COVID-19, which are likely going to become worse, and last longer, than the pandemic itself. Inequalities are going to rise, due to loss of wellbeing caused by the measures taken to contrast the spread of the virus. Such measures were directed towards everyone, despite the most vulnerable to the health consequences were also the ones with the smallest role on the economy. However, the economic consequences of the pandemic are especially affecting high-risk groups such as older adults. Making use of the SHARE Corona Survey, we examine the impact of COVID-19 among the older European population, focusing on their ability to make ends meet, loss of employment, and financial support received. Our results show that the ability to get through the month and the likelihood of job loss is positively correlated with increasing age, while aged individuals are less likely to receive financial support. Moreover, we show that such support mostly goes to those who really need it. We also reveal the existence of a social component of poverty. Finally, we highlight some interesting country group differences.

Global assessment of environment, health and economic impact of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).

The institution of social distancing and punitive measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 through human-to-human transmission has environmental, health and economic impact. While the global pandemic has led to the enhancement of the health system and decline of emissions, economic development appears deteriorating. Here, we present the global environmental, health and economic dimension of the effect of COVID-19 using qualitative and empirical assessments. We report the health system policies, environmental sustainability issues, and fiscal, monetary and exchange rate measures introduced during lockdown across countries. While air pollution is reported to have declined, municipal and medical waste is increasing. The COVID-19 global pandemic uncertainty ranks the UK as the country with the highest uncertainty level among 143 countries. The USA has introduced 100% of pre-COVID-19 crisis level GDP, the highest policy cut-rate among 162 countries. Science, innovation, research and development underpin COVID-19 containment measures implemented across countries. Our study demonstrates the need for future research to focus on environment-health-economic nexus-a trilemma that has a potential trade-off.