Healing the economic and social wounds inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic will take time, but the long road to recovery presents a unique opportunity to build back better. To catalyze change and succeed in the post-pandemic era, economic development policy and practice must see the crisis as an opportunity to rethink and redesign regional economic systems. This will involve creating a shared understanding of – and policies to address – the differential impacts of the pandemic across occupations, industries, and socioeconomic groups. This book explores the challenges and opportunities heralded by the virus in the broadest sense and presents case studies on equitable and inclusive economic recoveries.

The paper provides an ex-post analysis of the determinants of within-country regional het erogeneity of the labour market impact of COVID-19. By focussing on the first wave of the pandemic in the four largest euro area economies, it finds that the propagation of the eco nomic impact across regions cannot be explained by the spread of infections only. Instead, a region's economic structure is a significant driver of the observed heterogeneity. Moreover, our results suggest that a region's trade relations, both within and across countries, repre sent a relevant indirect channel through which COVID-19 related disruptions affect regional economic activity. In this regard, the analysis depicts vulnerabilities arising from potential disruptions of the highly integrated EU supply chains.

The COVID-19 pandemic upended our social and economic lives. Lockdowns forced firms to implement health and safety protocols, employees to work from home, and businesses of all sorts to close. Even as lockdowns eased, the landscape of work, commerce, leisure, and education was irrevocably transformed. While in many ways life has returned to normal, many of the changes wrought by the pandemic are here to stay. This book presents research on these transformations, examining how the economy and society were impacted. Organizing different aspects of the pandemic into individual chapters, this book examines issues such as financing structures, liquidity, profitmaking, investment, financial security, and market valuation, among other topics. Reflecting deep research as well as an extensive review of the literature, each chapter provides not just theoretical and empirical insight but also a set of policy recommendations to insure against similar crises in the future. Encompassing a range of case studies, it outlines strategies for dealing with the manifold challenges of today’s business environment. This book showcases the development of particular sectors over the course of the pandemic, and as such, serves as a valuable study, enabling a comprehensive analysis of topics ranging from economics to social dynamics. It provides a deep understanding of this unique period's wide-ranging challenges and transformations and underscores the central economic concern of the pandemic's effect on economic security, a topic discussed throughout several chapters. Furthermore, it includes a discussion on the broader scope of “polycrisis". This volume was designed to appeal to a wide range of readers interested in economics, management, regional studies, and related fields.

This book depicts and reveals the socioeconomic dynamics of the COVID-19 crisis, and its global, regional, and local perspectives. Explicitly interdisciplinary, this volume embraces a wide spectrum of topics across economics, business, public management, psychology, and public health. Written by global experts, each chapter offers a snapshot of an emerging aspect of the COVID-19 crisis for the benefit of academics and students, as well as the institutional, economic, social, and developmental policymakers and health practitioners on the ground.

Overconfident: How Economic and Health Fault Lines Left the Middle East and North Africa Ill-Prepared to Face COVID This report examines the region’s economic prospects in 2021, forecasting that the recovery will be both tenuous and uneven as per capita GDP level stays below pre-pandemic levels. COVID-19 was a stress-test for the region’s public health systems, which were already overwhelmed even before the pandemic. Indeed, a decade of lackluster economic reforms left a legacy of large public sectors and high public debt that effectively crowded out investments in social services such as public health. This edition points out that the region’s health systems were not only ill-prepared for the pandemic, but suffered from over-confidence, as authorities painted an overly optimistic picture in self-assessments of health system preparedness. Going forward, governments must improve data transparency for public health and undertake reforms to remedy historical underinvestment in public health systems.