The COVID-19 pandemic has created both a medical crisis and an economic crisis. As others have noted, we face challenges just as big as those in the Spanish Flu Pandemic and the Great Depression—all at once. The tasks facing policy-makers are extraordinary. Many new kinds of intervention are urgently required. This issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy has two objectives. The first is to explore these new interventions: evaluating their use, suggesting how they might be improved, and proposing alternatives. The second is to show that the challenges facing us are global and will require international cooperation if they are to be dealt with effectively. This short introductory essay positions the papers in the issue within an overall conceptual framework, with the aim of telling an overarching story about the pandemic.
This book predicts the decline of today's professions and describes the people and systems that will replace them. In an Internet society, according to Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, the clergy, consultants, lawyers, and many others, to work as they did in the 20th century. The Future of the Professions explains how 'increasingly capable systems' -- from telepresence to artificial intelligence -- will bring fundamental change in the way that the 'practical expertise' of specialists is made available in society. The authors challenge the 'grand bargain' -- the arrangement that grants various monopolies to today's professionals. They argue that our current professions are antiquated, opaque and no longer affordable, and that the expertise of their best is enjoyed only by a few. In their place, they propose six new models for producing and distributing expertise in society. The book raises important practical and moral questions. In an era when machines can out-perform human beings at most tasks, what are the prospects for employment, who should own and control online expertise, and what tasks should be reserved exclusively for people? Based on the authors' in-depth research of more than ten professions, and illustrated by numerous examples from each, this is the first book to assess and question the relevance of the professions in the 21st century.
This paper explores the concept of ‘global public goods’ (GPGs) in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that many of the tasks involved in public health, and in particular those involved in the control of an infectious disease like COVID-19, ought to be treated as GPGs that can only be effectively delivered through international cooperation. It sets out what a cooperative response to the COVID-19 pandemic should look like and introduces ideas for further discussion about how it might be financed.
This paper argues for the regular testing of people in groups that are more likely to be exposed to SARS-CoV-2, to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and resume economic activity. We call this ‘stratified periodic testing’. It is ‘stratified’ as it is based on at-risk groups, and ‘periodic’ as everyone in the group is tested at regular intervals. We argue that this is a better use of scarce testing resources than ‘universal random testing’, as has been recently discussed globally. We find that, under reasonable assumptions and allowing for false negative results 30 per cent of the time, 17 per cent of a subgroup would need to be tested each day to lower the effective reproduction number R from 2.5 to 0.75, under stratified periodic testing. Using the same assumptions the universal random testing rate would need to be 27 per cent (as opposed to 7 per cent as argued by Romer (2020b)). We obtain this rate of testing using a corrected method for calculating the impact of an infectious person on others, and allowing for asymptomatic cases. We also find that the effect of one day’s delay between testing positive and self-isolating is similar to having a test that is 30 per cent less accurate.
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