IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cte/whrepe/30673.html

Pandemics and protectionism: evidence from the "Spanish" flu

Author

Listed:
  • Boberg-Fazlic, Nina
  • Lampe, Markus
  • Pedersen, Maja Uhre
  • Sharp, Paul Richard

Abstract

The impact of COVID-19 on recent tendencies towards international isolationism has been much speculated on but remains to be seen. We suggest that valuable evidence can be gleaned from the "Spanish" flu of 1918-20. It is well-known that the world fell into a protectionist spiral following the First World War, but scholars have almost exclusively ignored the impact of the pandemic. We employ a difference-in-differences strategy on data for Europe and find that excess deaths had a significant impact on trade policy, independent of the war. A one standard deviation increase in excess deaths during the outbreak implied 0.022 percentage points higher tariffs subsequently, corresponding to an increase of one third of a standard deviation in tariffs. Health policy should aim to avoid the experience of the interwar period and consider the international macroeconomic impact of measures (not) taken.

Suggested Citation

  • Boberg-Fazlic, Nina & Lampe, Markus & Pedersen, Maja Uhre & Sharp, Paul Richard, 2020. "Pandemics and protectionism: evidence from the "Spanish" flu," IFCS - Working Papers in Economic History.WH 30673, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Instituto Figuerola.
    • Handle: RePEc:cte:whrepe:30673
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://e-archivo.uc3m.es/rest/api/core/bitstreams/033fb9b2-81aa-4bd5-88a1-4c188b72491b/content
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ivan Montiel & Junghoon Park & Bryan W. Husted & Andres Velez-Calle, 2022. "Tracing the connections between international business and communicable diseases," Journal of International Business Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Academy of International Business, vol. 53(8), pages 1785-1804, October.
    2. Sharp, Paul & Henriques, Sofia Teives & Tsoukli, Xanthi & Vedel, Christian, 2021. "Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability: Danish Butter Factories in the Face of Coal Shortages," CEPR Discussion Papers 16769, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    3. Henriques, Sofia Teives & Sharp, Paul & Tsoukli, Xanthi & Vedel, Christian, 2024. "Adaptability, diversification, and energy shocks: A firm level productivity analysis," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 139(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;

    JEL classification:

    • F13 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Trade Policy; International Trade Organizations
    • I19 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Other
    • N74 - Economic History - - Economic History: Transport, International and Domestic Trade, Energy, and Other Services - - - Europe: 1913-

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:cte:whrepe:30673. 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: Ana Poveda (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://portal.uc3m.es/portal/page/portal/instituto_figuerola .

    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.