European Vaccine-rollout Policy, Unraveled Markets, and Moral Externalities

Abstract

This paper seeks to address the role of European public policy in addressing the problem of Covid-19 vaccine-rollout policy. Currently in Europe, instead of market-based allocation a centralized command-based approach has been implemented to address the essential questions of production and distribution of vaccines throughout the EU. This is centralized, command-based decision-making on the allocation of vaccines which is leading to political and sociological tensions among EU Member States. Paper argues that in order to mitigate these shortcomings European public policy could employ a more nuanced approach. While employing law and economics tools this paper addresses the questions on how European societies should allocate vaccine and, more importantly, who should make this allocation decisions. Moreover, identified moral negative externalities, status quo and omission biases, planning fallacy, risk aversion, administrative rigidity, notorious type-I-type-II error fallacy and related unraveled markets phenomena might result in vaccine-rollout failures.