Identification of country resilience factors to COVID-19: a time series, cross-country analysis
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) qualified COVID-19 as a pandemic. Since that date, it has circulated across the vast majority of countries around the world. The available figures show that some countries are experiencing a favourable trend, whilst others are still struggling to control the development of the virus. What explains these differences in performance?
In this paper, we attempt to answer this question by conducting several cross country analyses on COVID-19 figures, covering 147 countries around the world, between April and September 2020. The objective is to find causal relationships between potential factors of resilience and performance in the COVID-19 severity measurement and monitoring index, designed by the Economic Prospective Bureau (Bureau de Prospective Economique, BPE) of Senegal. These potential factors of resilience have been selected according to the related literature and can be both structural and/or linked to disease governance measures.
Does income inequality really matter for credit booms?
The central question of this paper is whether income inequality causes credit booms along with other factors. We distinguish between different types of credit boom: real estate, household, and firms’ credit booms, as well as credit booms that turn into crises.
Using a sample of 70 countries between 1990 and 2016, we find that income inequality does not cause credit booms in our global sample. When splitting the data by income level, we find that income inequality is a determinant of credit booms turning into crisis in high income countries.
Capital inflows increase the likelihood of credit boom occurrence and countries experiencing high economic growth tend to have more credit booms. Finally, in countries with fixed exchange rate regimes, credit booms are more frequent.
A Conceptual Framework for Transitioning to an Authentic Sustainable World
In this article, using the ESIMOP / PROMISE framework of Roberto Rigobon and systems thinking concepts, we propose a dynamic systems perspective, to raise questions about the processes of change that are required, on multiple scales.
Based on this way of thinking, the example of COVID-19 episode highlights more than ever the critical need to find a clever equilibrium between human activity (in its several forms) and the Earth’s ability to cope, giving due consideration to the resulting general implications.
