The Economic Impact of the Black Death

Jedwab, Rémi; Johnson, Noel D.; Koyama, Mark

doi:10.1257/jel.20201639

Cited by 51 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 171 publications

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“…1919The positive effect of disease‐induced population loss on economic growth was also found in studies on the Black Death pandemic in Europe (Jedwab, Johnson and Koyama (2022) and on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa (Young 2005). …”

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confidence: 68%

COVID‐19 and Long‐Term Economic Growth

Hao

Gregg²,

Yao

2023

Australian Economic Review

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This article investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the long-term economic growth of South Africa. We embed an epidemiological model in a modified Solow-Swan model and explore various channels such as morbidity, mortality, unemployment, loss of school days and capital accumulation. We demonstrate that COVID-19 will lower the average annual growth rate of GDP per capita of South Africa by 0.07 percentage points in the next four decades, a 25 per cent decline relative to the no-COVID benchmark. We show that human capital losses due to school closures account for more than half of the economic slowdown.

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confidence: 68%

COVID‐19 and Long‐Term Economic Growth

Hao

Gregg²,

Yao

2023

Australian Economic Review

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“…Since the Black Death in the 14th century, epidemic diseases have generally increased prices via a reduction in labor supply, yielding medium-term benefits for surviving workers in the form of greater real wages. 140 Although the costs of the First World War were the principal cause of the inflation that followed, the flu may have contributed to higher prices. 141 The inflation set in around the close of 2020 was to be expected on the basis of the historical record.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Essential Business: The Flu, the War, and the Economy

Ehrenfreund

2023

J. gilded age prog. era

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During the First World War, the term “essential business” was used initially in military procurement, and then in disease control when pandemic influenza struck. Essential businesses were exempt from restrictions imposed in the interest of national defense or public health, so debates about essential business concerned the necessity of various goods and services to the consumer. Ultimately, the concept of essential business depended on a shared understanding of the American consumer’s rights and duties as a citizen. On the one hand, consumers furthered the state’s interests by complying with, interpreting, implementing, and enforcing public-health restrictions. On the other, what contemporaries called “the American standard of living” entitled citizens to maintain relatively large expenditures. This relationship between citizenship and consumption explains the economy’s surprising stability in 1918. The flu did not cause a depression because social norms authorized most consumer expenditures as legitimate and appropriate, even during the wartime epidemic. “Essential” work is theorized using the Marxist concept of socially necessary labor, which relates productivity and purchasing power to norms of consumption.

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“…Historians also point out that disease, including pandemics, has not necessarily resulted in political instability (de Waal, 2010;Wever & van Bergen, 2014). There are broad historical transformations in which infectious disease is asserted to have led to beneficial outcomes, such as the rise of new economic structures and the modern European world in the wake of the Yersinia pestis pandemic, better known as the Black Death (Belich, 2022;Cantor, 2001;Jedwab et al, 2022).…”

Section: Securitization Of Diseasementioning

confidence: 99%

How COVID-19 is reshaping U.S. national security policy

Kosal

2023

Polit. life sci.

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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States is actively reshaping parts of its national security enterprise. This article explores the underlying politics, with a specific interest in the context of biosecurity, biodefense, and bioterrorism strategy, programs, and response, as the United States responds to the most significant outbreak of an emerging infectious disease in over a century. How the implicit or tacit failure to recognize the political will and political decision-making connected to warfare and conflict for biological weapons programs in these trends is explored. Securitization of public health has been a focus of the literature over the past half century. This recent trend may represent something of an inverse: an attempt to treat national security interests as public health problems. A hypothesis is that the most significant underrecognized problem associated with COVID-19 is disinformation and the weakening of confidence in institutions, including governments, and how adversaries may exploit that blind spot.

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The Economic Impact of the Black Death

Cited by 51 publications

References 171 publications

COVID‐19 and Long‐Term Economic Growth

COVID‐19 and Long‐Term Economic Growth

Essential Business: The Flu, the War, and the Economy

How COVID-19 is reshaping U.S. national security policy

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