scholarly journals When the Pandemic Creates Behavioral Changes and Economic Crisis: The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Implications for Policy Making

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ava Chae ◽  
Janet Hanson

The COVID-19 pandemic is no longer simply a “health crisis” but seems to have far-reaching impacts and implications as well. The pandemic has led to an unprecedented decline in consumer confidence (demand shock) as people quickly changed their spending behavior to focus on basic needs. In response, the government has taken actions to boost consumer confidence and spending through stimulus packages and other aid. This research uses a public database of private sector data with current information on consumer spending and employment and implements Abraham Maslow’s psychological theory, the hierarchy of needs, and Keynesian economics to explain consumer spending behaviors and the U.S. government’s response to the pandemic. Three hypotheses are developed and tested using regression analysis. First, the findings of the regression discontinuity show significantly higher spending in industries fulfilling basic needs than in nonessential sectors. Second, a causal relationship was found between aggregate demand, more specifically consumer spending, and employment, revealing the distinctness of the pandemic-caused recession driven by coronavirus fear. The final regression discontinuity was tested to observe the effect of stimulus checks (CARES Act) on spending and economic recovery, revealing positive impacts of boosting aggregate demand. This study provides evidence that while high-income households and individuals were the least impacted by the pandemic regarding employment, they showed the most dramatic changes in spending behavior. The study provides discussions and implications as to how to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 recession in the U.S.

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (SPL1) ◽  
pp. 462-468
Author(s):  
Latika kothari ◽  
Sanskruti Wadatkar ◽  
Roshni Taori ◽  
Pavan Bajaj ◽  
Diksha Agrawal

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a communicable infection caused by the novel coronavirus resulting in severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV). It was recognized to be a health crisis for the general population of international concern on 30th January 2020 and conceded as a pandemic on 11th March 2020. India is taking various measures to fight this invisible enemy by adopting different strategies and policies. To stop the COVID-19 from spreading, the Home Affairs Ministry and the health ministry, of India, has issued the nCoV 19 guidelines on travel. Screening for COVID-19 by asking questions about any symptoms, recent travel history, and exposure. India has been trying to get testing kits available. The government of India has enforced various laws like the social distancing, Janata curfew, strict lockdowns, screening door to door to control the spread of novel coronavirus. In this pandemic, innovative medical treatments are being explored, and a proper vaccine is being hunted to deal with the situation. Infection control measures are necessary to prevent the virus from further spreading and to help control the current situation. Thus, this review illustrates and explains the criteria provided by the government of India to the awareness of the public to prevent the spread of COVID-19.


2008 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 653 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Horlick ◽  
Joe Cyr ◽  
Scott Reynolds ◽  
Andrew Behrman

Under the United States Alien Tort Statute, which permits non-U.S. citizens to bring lawsuits in U.S. courts for human rights violations that are violations of the law of nations, plaintiffs have filed claims against multinational oil and gas corporations for the direct or complicit commission of such violations carried out by the government of the country in which the corporation operated. In addition to exercising jurisdiction over U.S. corporations, U.S. courts have exercised jurisdiction in cases involving non-U.S. defendants for alleged wrongful conduct against non-U.S. plaintiffs committed outside the U.S.The exercise of jurisdiction by U.S. courts over non-U.S. defendants for alleged wrongful conduct against non-U.S. plaintiffs committed outside of the U.S. raises serious questions as to the jurisdictional foundation on which the power of U.S. courts to adjudicate them rests. Defences that foreign defendants can raise against the exercise of jurisdiction by the U.S. courts are an objection to the extraterritorial assertion of jurisdiction, the act of state doctrine, the political question doctrine, forum non conveniens, and the principle of comity. These defences are bolstered by the support of the defendant’s home government and other governments.


Author(s):  
Gregory R. Wagner ◽  
Emily A. Spieler

This chapter discusses the roles of government in promoting occupational and environmental health, with a focus on the U.S. federal government. Governmental interventions, as described here, can range from non-regulatory interventions, such as dissemination of information or generation and communication of information, to establishing regulatory requirements through the promulgation and enforcement of standards and regulations. The chapter describes the U.S. laws and roles of the administrative agencies responsible for occupational and environmental health, including the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Noting the budgetary and political constraints on these federal agencies, the chapter goes on to discuss briefly the role of the public and the states. The government also plays a role when preventive efforts fail, and the chapter provides a brief summary of programs designed to provide compensation to injured workers.


Author(s):  
Kélina Gotman

Native American dancers in the 1890s rebelling against the U.S. government’s failure to uphold treaties protecting land rights and rations were accused of fomenting a dancing ‘craze’. Their dancing—which hoped for a renewal of Native life—was subject to intense government scrutiny and panic. The government anthropologist James Mooney, in participant observation and fieldwork, described it as a religious ecstasy like St. Vitus’s dance. The Ghost Dance movement escalated with the proliferation of reports, telegraphs, and letters circulating via Washington, DC. Although romantically described as ‘geognosic’—nearly mineral—ancestors of the whites, Native rebels in the Plains were told to stop dancing so they could work and thus modernize; their dancing was deemed excessive, wasteful, and unproductive. The government’s belligerently declared state of exception—effectively cultural war—was countered by one that they performed ecstatically. ‘Wasted’ energy, dancers maintained, trumped dollarization—the hollow ‘use value’ of capitalist biopower.


2002 ◽  
Vol 28 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 179-213
Author(s):  
Maxwell J. Mehlman ◽  
Kirsten M. Rabe

Imagine a world in which parents can genetically enhance their child's height so that he becomes a professional basketball player. Or imagine a law school student preparing for the bar who takes out an extra loan to genetically enhance his intelligence. What if going to your physician for a routine physical included the option of genetically enhancing any trait you desired? And what if such a practice was expensive and, therefore, only available to the privileged members of society? Is this desirable or should the U.S. government ban genetic enhancement? What if the government bans it and citizens travel abroad to receive genetic enhancement treatments? Can the U.S. government do anything to prevent access to illegal genetic enhancement abroad?


Author(s):  
TYLER T. RENY ◽  
BENJAMIN J. NEWMAN

Does social protest following the police killing of unarmed Black civilians have a widespread “opinion-mobilizing” effect against the police? Or, does the racialized nature of these events polarize mass opinion based on standing racial and political orientations? To answer these questions, we use a large dataset comprised of weekly cross sections of the American public and employ a regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) approach leveraging the random timing of the police killing of George Floyd and ensuing nationwide protests. We find that the Floyd protests swiftly decreased favorability toward the police and increased perceived anti-Black discrimination among low-prejudice and politically liberal Americans. However, attitudes among high-prejudice and politically conservative Americans either remained unchanged or evinced only small and ephemeral shifts. Our evidence suggests that the Floyd protests served to further racialize and politicize attitudes within the domain of race and law enforcement in the U.S.


1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 549-563
Author(s):  
Oliver P. Rafferty

The political threat posed by the growth of Fenianism in Ireland in the late 1850s and early 1860s has generally been underplayed by much present-day historiography. Even contemporaries were not disposed to see American Fenianism as much of a danger to the constitutional stability of Ireland. The Dublin police authorities decided to recall sub-inspector Thomas Doyle from his surveillance work in America in July 1860. By that time Doyle had sent dozens of reports on Irish-American revolutionary activity. On the basis of his reports the authorities knew that John O'Mahony and Michael Dohney, both of 1848 notoriety, were prominently involved in Phoenix and Fenian conspiracy. They also knew the general points of the ‘phoenix theory’ that England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity, that men were being recruited and drilled in large numbers in the U.S. for a possible invasion of Ireland, that ‘O'Mahony's theory [was] … to root out the Government, to cut down the landlords, and to confiscate the land of Ireland’, and that John Mitchel had gone to Paris as an agent for the ‘phoenix confederacy’ in the U.S.


Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (13) ◽  
pp. 2582 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Lotsu ◽  
Yuichiro Yoshida ◽  
Katsufumi Fukuda ◽  
Bing He

Confronting an energy crisis, the government of Ghana enacted a power factor correction policy in 1995. The policy imposes a penalty on large-scale electricity users, namely, special load tariff (SLT) customers of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), whose power factor is below 90%. This paper investigates the impact of this policy on these firms’ power factor improvement by using panel data from 183 SLT customers from 1994 to 1997 and from 2012. To avoid potential endogeneity, this paper adopts a regression discontinuity design (RDD) with the power factor of the firms in the previous year as a running variable, with its cutoff set at the penalty threshold. The result shows that these large-scale electricity users who face the penalty because their power factor falls just short of the threshold are more likely to improve their power factor in the subsequent year, implying that the power factor correction policy implemented by Ghana’s government is effective.


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