The Economics of Pandemics

This book offers a lively account of the humanitarian, economic, societal, and planetwide impacts of the pandemics, the COVID-19 pandemic included, which are traced back to as early as the 14th century plague pandemic. Placing the pandemics along with other globally shared resources, such as global warming, AI singularity, and high-risk physics experiments, each of the nine chapters of the book discusses the global health crises from a variety of unique standpoints, including infectious diseases, economics, governance, and public health. Based on the historical records of past pandemics and the rich data from the COVID-19 pandemic, a conceptual framework is presented for the economics of pandemics as a globally shared experience.

This book aims to critically examine salient features in the global responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, including global governance, lockdowns, radical movements, and mRNA vaccines. The book will be a valuable resource to students, researchers, and policymakers who are working in the fields of environmental economics, global-scale public goods, and health economics.

S. Niggol Seo is a natural resource economist who specializes in the study of global warming and globally shared goods, currently at the Muaebak Institute of Global Warming Studies. He received a Ph.D. degree from Yale University in 2006 with a dissertation on microbehavioural economics of climate change. He has worked on various projects with the World Bank on climate change in Africa, Latin America, and Asia and held Professor positions in the UK, Spain, and Australia from 2006 to 2015.