Addressing the COVID-19 Pandemic: Comparing Alternative Value Frameworks

David Bloom, Maddalena Ferranna and Jp Sevilla

No 15904, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has forced countries to make difficult ethical choices, e.g., how to balance public health and socioeconomic activity and whom to prioritize in allocating vaccines or other scarce medical resources. We discuss the implications of benefit-cost analysis, utilitarianism, and prioritarianism in evaluating COVID-19-related policies. The relative regressivity of COVID-19 burdens and control policy costs determines whether increased sensitivity to distribution supports more or less aggressive control policies. Utilitarianism and prioritarianism, in that order, increasingly favor income redistribution mechanisms compared with benefit-cost analysis. The concern for the worse-off implies that prioritarianism is more likely than utilitarianism or benefit-cost analysis to target young and socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals in the allocation of scarce vaccine doses.

Keywords: Prioritarianism; Benefit-cost analysis; Utilitarianism; Covid-19; Vaccine allocation; Lockdown; Control policies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D6 I1 I3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15904 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15904

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15904

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().