Impacts of environmental issues on an optimal social distancing policy towards the Covid-19 pandemic

Impacts des enjeux environnementaux sur une politique de distanciation sociale optimale face à la pandémie de Covid-19

Gildas Appéré and Muriel Travers ()
Additional contact information
Muriel Travers: LEMNA - Laboratoire d'économie et de management de Nantes Atlantique - IEMN-IAE Nantes - Institut d'Économie et de Management de Nantes - Institut d'Administration des Entreprises - Nantes - UN - Université de Nantes

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: The 2020 Coronavirus COVID 19 pandemic has brutally confronted most national governments with a dilemma between fighting the pandemic and maintaining the economic activity. In a very short time, in the absence of effective vaccines and antivirals, they had to think about the implementation of a social distancing policy the least damaging for the economic activity by defining both its magnitude and its timeline. Depending on the priorities displayed by governments between preserving the economic activity and fighting the spread of the pandemic, social distancing policies can vary significantly. However, it was quickly observed that a social distancing policy has also had immediate positive environmental effects linked to the deep fall in the economic activity. This article models how the degree of environmental awareness in public decision-making acts on the optimal social distancing policy. The main conclusion is that higher consideration by the public authorities of the negative environmental effects generated by the economic activity can consolidate a social distancing policy against the pandemic.

Keywords: Economic activity; Optimal control; Pandemic; Pollution; Social distancing policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-06-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03250686v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-03250686v1/document (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:hal:wpaper:hal-03250686

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().