scholarly journals The economics of the COVID-19 pandemic: an assessment

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S1-S13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Susskind ◽  
David Vines
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
International Cooperation ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Introductory Essay ◽  
Medical Crisis ◽  
Spanish Flu

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has created both a medical crisis and an economic crisis. As others have noted, we face challenges just as big as those in the Spanish Flu Pandemic and the Great Depression—all at once. The tasks facing policy-makers are extraordinary. Many new kinds of intervention are urgently required. This issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy has two objectives. The first is to explore these new interventions: evaluating their use, suggesting how they might be improved, and proposing alternatives. The second is to show that the challenges facing us are global and will require international cooperation if they are to be dealt with effectively. This short introductory essay positions the papers in the issue within an overall conceptual framework, with the aim of telling an overarching story about the pandemic.

The Politics of Consumer Debt

2012 ◽  
Vol 644 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Hyman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic Policy ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
State Power ◽  
Private Investment ◽  
Consumer Debt ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Great Depression

Facing a crisis of idle capital during the Great Depression, policy-makers developed new ways to promote private investment for public ends. Throughout the twentieth century, the use of state power to guide investment has been a powerful, and now largely ignored, tool of economic policy.

The Primal Force of the Great Depression

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The Other ◽  
Vulnerable Groups ◽  
Stock Market Crash ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Classical Economic ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Brain

This chapter examines the impact of the Great Depression on classical economic ideas. When the Great Depression struck after the stock market crash of October 1929, economists in the classical tradition such as Joseph Schumpeter and Lionel Robbins chose to do nothing. They argued that the depression must be allowed to run its course. The chapter first considers U.S. economic policy under Franklin D. Roosevelt, focusing on how he addressed three visible features of the depression: deflation in prices, unemployment, and the hardship depression suffered by especially vulnerable groups. It also discusses the views of two scholars who belonged to the group known as the Roosevelt Brains Trust (later the Brain Trust), Rexford Guy Tugwell and Adolf A. Berle Jr. Finally, it explores how depression and price deflation led to two efforts to raise prices, one through the National Recovery Act and the other through agriculture.

Elusive equalities and the Great Recession: restoration, retrenchment and redistribution

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-441
Author(s):  
Janine Brodie
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Crisis Responses

AbstractThe 2008 global financial meltdown, commonly called the ‘Great Recession’, was the most serious crisis in capitalism since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and a fundamental repudiation of neoliberal governing assumptions. This paper focuses on the contexts that informed two governmental responses to this economic crisis — restoration and retrenchment through public austerity. It explains that these responses were contingent, experimental, inequitable and, in the end, unsuccessful. Restoration and retrenchment, however, were entirely consistent with previous neoliberal crisis-responses and the abiding ambitions of this governing project. As the economic crisis crawled into the second half of a decade, the idea of inequality was increasingly identified as an underlying cause of crisis and its amelioration as a necessary part of rebuilding economies and communities in a post-crisis era. The paper tracks the case for the revival of equality politics and policies in the early twenty-first century.

Consumer Co-operation and Economic Crisis: The 1936 Roosevelt Inquiry on Co-operative Enterprise and the Emergence of the Nordic ‘Middle Way’

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARY HILSON
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Nordic Countries ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Middle Way ◽  
Model Region

AbstractIn the wake of the Great Depression, Sweden and the other Nordic countries were widely perceived as a model region, a successful example of the ‘middle way’ between socialism and capitalism. Central to this idea were the Nordic co-operative movements, which became the focus of President Roosevelt's Inquiry on Co-operative Enterprise in Europe, conducted in 1936–7. Drawing mainly on the records of the Inquiry, the article explores the construction of the ‘middle way’ idea and examines the role of the Nordic co-operators in shaping international perceptions of the region, while also shedding new light on differences within the international co-operative movement during the same period.

The Workplace and Economic Crisis: Canadian Textile Firms, 1929–1935

2009 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 498-528
Author(s):  
Robert Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Product Line ◽  
Scientific Management ◽  
State Regulations ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Managerial Authority ◽  
The Face ◽  
Production Practices ◽  
Industrial State

The devastating conditions of the Great Depression forced manufacturers to rethink their approach to workplace control, economic policy, and production practices. Although we know a great deal about how industries responded to the depression, we know very little about the changes implemented by firms. This is unfortunate as firms in the same industry face quite different problems, possess dissimilar work cultures, construct an array of production formats, and have access to a range of financial resources. Based on a literature that documents the variety of strategies devised by industries and firms, this paper shows how four Canadian textile firms—two cotton and two hosiery and knitting—reacted to the economic crisis of the Great Depression. In the face of a different array of conditions, each firm devised different restructuring strategies. The large cotton corporations responded by combining mechanization, product line change, and a new division of labor. The smaller, more competitive hosiery and knitting firms, on the other hand, imposed either a harsh regime of scientific management or conservative, piecemeal changes. In the midst of restructuring the workplace, manufacturers reasserted their prerogatives of managerial authority, selectively took advantage of the opportunities opened up by economic crisis, and created a new regime of industrial-state regulations.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ECONOMIC CRISES AND HEALTH

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 477-494 ◽  
Author(s):  
KIRSTY WALKER
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Economic Downturn ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
History Of Public Health ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
New Directions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

ABSTRACTDuring periods of recession, both historians and policy-makers have tended to revisit the multi-faceted relationship between health and economic crisis. It seems likely that the current economic downturn will trigger a new revival of efforts to gauge its implications for people's health around the world. This review will reflect on aspects of the relationship between health and economic crisis, exploring some of the unanswered questions within the historiography of the Great Depression and health, and suggest new directions that this work might take. Within a broadly transnational framework, I will reassess the diverse historiographies of interwar public health, in order to highlight ways in which the methodologies used could inspire future studies for neglected areas within this field, such as Southeast Asia. In doing so, I will illustrate that the effects of the interwar economic fluctuations on health status remain imprecise and difficult to define, but marked a transitional moment in the history of public health.

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