Economic theory facing COVID-19: From Joseph Schumpeter to Robert Solow

Roger Tsafack Nanfosso and Juliana Hadjitchoneva

Economic Thought journal, 2022, issue 1, 54-74

Abstract: The Covid appeared in November 2019 in China and was declared a “pandemic” in March 2020 by the World Health Organization. It surprised the whole world: all countries are affected, airborne at high speed, mutant and playing with measures against it, insensitive to nationalities, the richest are by far more affected than the poor, and victims by the millions. It has forced life to withdraw from its usual spaces of deployment, except for places where the macabre accounting of the disappeared is rampant. In a context of such disarray, and if we agree with Robbins (1932, р. 15) that “Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses”, it may be useful to question the force of the laws, rules and other theorems stated by such a science in the face of a pandemic whose severity index, which reaches a maximum of 5, is equalled only by that of the Spanish flu of 1918-1921. To do so, we use an analytical methodology in that by briefly revisiting the ideas of the last six of the twelve seminal thinkers identified by Yueh (2019) (Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich Hayek, Joan Robinson, Milton Friedman, Douglas North, and Robert Solow), we attempt to discuss the resilience of their ideas (or the permanence of the relevance of their findings) in the light of the pandemic. The result indicates that not all ideas are immutable.

JEL-codes: B12 B13 B14 O10 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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