IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/wsi/wschap/9789811262739_0002.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Economic History of Pandemics

In: Flattening the Curve COVID-19 & Grand Challenges for Global Health, Innovation, and Economy

Author

Listed:
  • Chinmay Tumbe

Abstract

COVID-19 has brought the attention to the study of past pandemics to ascertain if there are common trends across pandemics and what one might anticipate in the future. This chapter reviews pandemics through the lens of economic history to see their linkages with income, inequality, migration, and globalization. Pandemics tend to be supply-side shocks that depress incomes, either through lockdowns or mass mortality, by constraining the supply of labor. Pandemics also tend to increase inequality in the short run due to the disproportionate impact of economic and mortality dislocations on the poor. However, when mortality shocks have been large, the aftermath of the pandemic could also reduce inequality due to the rising bargaining power of scarce labor. Migrant flight from cities is one of the most stylized facts of pandemics, leading to supply-side disruptions and delayed economic recoveries. Globalization may not have caused more frequent pandemics, but the occurrence of a pandemic has often led to restrictions on the movement of people and slowed down globalization. The COVID-19 pandemic shares some of these features of past pandemics but also differs in its mortality profile, and hence, the economic repercussions also differ to some extent.

Suggested Citation

  • Chinmay Tumbe, 2023. "The Economic History of Pandemics," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Chirantan Chatterjee & Anindya S Chakrabarti & Anil B Deolalikar (ed.), Flattening the Curve COVID-19 & Grand Challenges for Global Health, Innovation, and Economy, chapter 2, pages 41-62, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
  • Handle: RePEc:wsi:wschap:9789811262739_0002
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789811262739_0002
    Download Restriction: Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

    File URL: https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789811262739_0002
    Download Restriction: Ebook Access is available upon purchase.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    COVID-19; Pandemic; Health Economics; Innovation; Economic Development; Sustainability;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I15 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Economic Development
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wsi:wschap:9789811262739_0002. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tai Tone Lim (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.worldscientific.com/page/worldscibooks .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.