The COVID-19 Pandemic and International Trade: Temporary Turbulence or Paradigm Shift?

By L. Gruszczynski. European Journal of Risk Regulation, 2020

129 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The COVID-19 epidemic has taken the world by surprise. Initially, it was seen as a Chinese, and later South-East Asian, problem. Decision-makers around the world apparently believed that the disease could be contained and controlled within the region, following a pattern that was evident in previous outbreaks, such as SARS. However, due to a combination of different factors of natural, political and regulatory character, 1 the epidemic has quickly spread to other parts of the world and has been eventually recognised by the World Health Organization as a pandemic. The existing interconnectedness among countries obviously facilitated that expansion. So far, the pandemic has been predominantly seen as a public health problem. As of 3 April 2020, there were more than 1 million confirmed cases globally, with almost 60,000 registered deaths. 2 These numbers are expected to rise sharply in the near future. While some countries appear to be gaining control over the situation (eg China), others are either still battling to slow down the spread of the disease (eg Italy and Spain) or are in the early stages, which are typically characterised by exponential growth in cases (eg the USA and Poland). There are, however, other potentially equally serious consequences, the importance of which will only be appreciated as time passes. The current public health emergency will be followed by the mutually reinforcing economic and political crises that may ultimately lead to serious social disturbance as the costs of the pandemic will not only be high, but also unevenly distributed, both among countries and among different social groups within states. 3

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1dc0ab90f3fc316e6156f054b76f747bb3195681

Citations in the corpus