Bouncing forward: a resilience approach to dealing with COVID-19 and future systemic shocks

Abstract

Policy questions are often framed in popular discussion as situations where pulling the right levers will get the economy and society back on track after shocks and crises. This approach ignores how systems interact and how their systemic properties shape socioeconomic outcomes, leading to an over-emphasis on a limited set of characteristics, notably efficiency. We argue that this emphasis on efficiency in the operation, management and outcomes of various economic and social systems is not a conscious collective choice, but rather the response of the whole system to the incentives that individual components face. This has brought much of the world to rely upon complex, nested, and interconnected systems to deliver goods and services around the globe. While this approach has many benefits, the Covid-19 crisis shows how it has also reduced the resilience of key systems to shocks, and allowed failures to cascade from one system to others. This paper reviews the impact of COVID-19 on socioeconomic systems, discusses the notion of resilience, and provides specific recommendations on both integrating resilience analytics for recovery from the current crisis as well as on building resilient infrastructure to address future systemic challenges. Keywords Covid-19 • Coronavirus • OECD • Resilience • Economic impact • Risk"Everything we do before a pandemic will seem alarmist, everything we do after a pandemic will seem inadequate".

Can neighborhoods protect residents from mental distress during the COVID-19 pandemic? Evidence from Wuhan

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The Economic Resilience of the Austrian Agriculture since the EU Accession

“…Another characteristic which can be observed when analyzing the economic resilience of Austrian agriculture is a "bounce-forward" effect (Hynes et al 2020). Austrian agriculture not only recovers very fast from external shocks but also shows a better end result than in years prior to crises, further indicating a general improvement in overall resilience.…”

Resilience and projects: An interdisciplinary crossroad

“…At the network level of organisations (e.g., supply chain or ecosystem level), resilience refers to the ability of a loosely coupled system of firms to respond to the variations in its overall performance, often a final value to the end-user Christopher and Peck, 2004; ) Ponomarov and Holcomb, 2009 ). Disruptions can be exogenous ( Adobor, 2019 ) such as the case of the 11 March 2011 tsunami in Japan ( Revilla and Saenz, 2017 ; Li et al., 2019 ; Aldrich, 2019 ), 2019/20 Australian Bushfires ( Resilience Shift, 2020 ), and the COVID-19 pandemic ( del Rio-Chanona et al., 2020 ; Haynes et al., 2020 ), They can also be endogenous such as the case of counterfeit, fraudulent and suspect items ( Naderpajouh et al., 2015 ). The research paradigm on supply chain resilience revolves around these issues and emphasizes the importance of early detection of signs of crisis, flexible organising of supply chains, buffering and relational capital as potential remedial mechanisms towards increased resilience ( Kochan and Nowicki, 2018 ).…”

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