Building back better?

A global health and economic crisis was created by the spread of Covid-19 across the world during the course of 2020 and into 2021. This Special Issue of the International Review of Applied Economics brings together papers analysing various aspects of this twin crisis. The crisis led to massive intervention by governments, both to tackle the health crisis - through lock-downs; social distancing measures; test, trace and isolate programmes; and to develop and then provide vaccinations - and to offset the economic damage created by the lock-downs, the fall in travel and trade, and so forth. Several of the papers take up the challenge of how we might ‘build back better’. The leading expert on organisational studies and organisational behaviour John Child notes that while the Covid-19 pandemic intensified many of the economic and social problems that societies were already facing, the public response to the crisis points to a constructive way forward, including people participating in collective activities to contribute to addressing the common challenge, arguing that “it is timely to widen participation in organisational decision-making as an approach to addressing many of the problems which will continue to be with us post-Covid, and which indeed the pandemic has exacerbated”. These further challenges include inequality, and the climate crisis. Both could be tackled through a global Green New Deal.