Contagious inequality: economic disparities and excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic

Excess all-cause mortality and COVID-19-related mortality: A temporal analysis in 22 countries, from January until August 2020

Bishoy Louis Zaki, Francesco Nicoli, Ellen Wayenberg and Bram Verschuere

Policy and Society, 2022, vol. 41, issue 2, 199-216

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the need to consider multiple and often novel perspectives on contemporary policymaking in the context of technically complex, ambiguous, and large-scale crises. In this article, we focus on exploring a territory that remains relatively unchartered on a large scale, namely the relationship between economic inequalities and excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic, using a dataset of 25 European countries spanning 300 regions. Our findings reveal two pathways by which economic asymmetries and inequalities can observably influence excess mortality: labor market structures (capturing concentrations of industrial jobs) and income inequalities (capturing concentrations and asymmetries in income distribution). We leverage our findings to offer recommendations for policymakers toward a more deliberate consideration of the multidimensionality of technically complex, large-scale crises with a high degree of societal embeddedness. These findings also urge future scholarship to utilize a range of parameters and indicators for better understanding the relationship between cues and outcomes in such complex settings.

Keywords: inequality; economic inequality; crisis; crisis governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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