Pandemics Depress the Economy, Public Health Interventions Do Not: Evidence from the 1918 Flu
preliminary report from
Sergio Correia, Federal Reserve Board
Stephan Luck, Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Emil Verner, MIT Sloan School of Management
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Questions asked and answered:
1) What is the economic cost of epidemics
2) Do non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as social distancing have economic costs, or do policies that slow the spread of the pandemic also reduce its economic severity?
Conclusions: Altogether, our findings suggest that pandemics can have substantial economic costs, and NPIs can have economic merits, beyond lowering mortality
It's a long report, 45 pages in all. The first few pages contain the meat of the subject. The whole point of this report is summed up as: The current measures are not hurting the economy, they are helping. What hurts the economy is the disease. Cure it and the economy will do fine.