新冠疫情与宏观经济.docx

Introduction
This is the age of consequences: the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 instantly exposed the inability of governing institutions to contain the epidemic, the inadequacy of public health systems (broken by decades of fiscal austerity) and the sharp economic and health inequalities and social fragmentation in society. SARS-CoV-2 has clinically uncovered our societies’ pre-existing structural weaknesses — most of which are due to the mistaken neoliberal macroeconomic policies pursued ever since the early 1980s (Marmot et al. 2020a, 2020b; Woolhandler et al. 2021). Nature cannot be fooled.
The results of four decades of neoliberal (mis-)management of the OECD economies are not a secret (Storm 2017): long-term growth is declining (‘secular stagnation’), suffocated by rising inequalities in income and wealth and by an obsessive-compulsive fiscal austerity by governments, but barely kept alive by rising (private and public) indebtedness and quasi- permanent asset-price bubbles (‘financialization’). This neoliberal model suffered a first near- death experience in 2008, in the form of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the ensuing not so Great Recession. But it rather miraculously survived, helped by massive (taxpayers’) support of governments and central banks and more by luck than through skill. But in the process, it further toxified, and this strongly fueled the growth of (mostly right-wing) populism, destabilizing erstwhile stable democracies, notably Britain (‘Brexit’) and the . (‘Trump’).
When we let the corona-virus enter our societies through the front-door in early 2020, the virus rapidly found a deadly path through pre-existing socio-economic inequalities and vulnerabilities, with individuals and families at the bottom of the social and economic scale, who were missing out already long before the health emergenc