INTRODUCTION: ECONOMIC CONTRIBUTIONS TO INFECTION CONTROL

Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis has upended the lives of many, causing almost 200M global infections to date, over 4M deaths and untold damage to the livelihoods of millions. Although the recent vaccine rollout in some parts of the world offers some room for optimism, the epidemic is still far from defeated andmany in the developing world are still at significant risk of infection. The nature of the crisis, ostensibly one related to public health, has proved to be multi-pronged, with economic and social behaviour, public health policy and economic policy closely intertwined and both reacting to and conditioning the future path of the epidemic. The policy challenged posed by the epidemic were well articulated by Chadha (2021). The severity and characteristics of COVID-19 have meant that people have spontaneously and voluntarily changed how they work, shop and socialise. In turn, these decisions have had severe social and economic consequences, with many businesses struggling to stay afloat in an environment where customers have feared and avoided crowded spaces such as retail, hospitality and public transport. As expected,most governments have sought to actively intervene and cushion people and businesses against the worst fallout from the epidemic. Yet, many governments have struggled to understand who to ask for advice and even to formulate the kind of expertise needed to navigate the crisis. As a point in case, the government of the UK has been advised primarily by three different sets of experts, namely the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M), the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) and HM Treasury, respectively. SPI-M, a subgroup of Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) consisting of technical epidemiologists and modelling experts, have provided forecasting and decision support to the government by considering and simulating different possible scenarios, based on complicated mathematical models of the epidemic. Notably, the models considered by SPI-M are largely mechanistic, non-behavioural models that do not take individual behaviour into account. In addition, the remit of SPI-M explicitly disregarded the effects of different public healthmeasures, such as social distancing and lockdowns on the overall economy. In fact, it appears that economic considerations were specifically disregarded in advice formulated by SPI-M. SPI-B, another subgroup of SAGE, was tasked with considering the behavioural aspects of the crisis. Consisting primarily of behavioural scientists and psychologists, this group considered how different policy measures would likely be received by the public and how different policy interventions should be presented. Although grounded in empirical and theoretical work in behavioural sciences, the advice given by SPI-B appears not to have been directly integrated into the epidemic modelling carried out by SPI-M but rather was considered by decision makers alongside the modelling advice. In addition, SPI-B was not tasked with determining the aggregate consequences of behaviour on either the path of the epidemic nor on the likely impact of behaviour change on the macroeconomy. Last, economists working at HM Treasury were tasked with looking after the economy. Reportedly, the Treasury has scarce direct import from either SPI-M or SPI-B and thus treated the epidemic as