A Macro-Theoretic Exploration of Some Covid-19 Induced Constraints on Economic Policy

Chandrasekaran Saratchand

Review of Political Economy, 2024, vol. 36, issue 2, 776-791

Abstract: The Covid-19 pandemic has spawned a crisis whose dimensions encompass the domains of health and the economy. The latter is on account of the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions such as lockdowns in order to deal with a highly contagious disease. Though some vaccines have emerged, lockdowns of varying degrees are still required since geographical coverage of vaccines is uneven, the protection afforded by vaccines is only for a finite period of time and new variants may escape existing vaccines. This provides the context within which economic policy could intervene. Monetary policy is either unavailable or ineffective, especially when the neoliberal project is hegemonic. Therefore, the specific policy instrument that tends to be utilised is fiscal policy wherein it is postulated that the government tries to achieve a target degree of capacity utilisation. It is demonstrated within the framework of a heterodox macroeconomic model that considerations involving macroeconomic stability (and political economy more generally) may cause this target to be below what is warranted by public health requirements. The paper concludes with some suggestions for future work in this research direction.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09538259.2022.2062964 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:revpoe:v:36:y:2024:i:2:p:776-791

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CRPE20

DOI: 10.1080/09538259.2022.2062964

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Political Economy is currently edited by Steve Pressman and Louis-Philippe Rochon

More articles in Review of Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().