RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 Balancing mitigation policies during pandemics: economic, health, and environmental implications
A1 de Frutos, Javier
A1 La Torre, Davide
A1 Liuzzi, Danilo
A1 Marsiglio, Simone
A1 Martín-Herran, Guiomar
AB The strategies implemented to contain the spread of COVID-19 have clearly shown theexistence of a nontrivial relation between epidemiological and environmental outcomes. Onthe one hand, mitigation policy generates unclear pollution effects, since social distancingmeasures favor a reduction in industrial emissions while health regulations and recommendationscontribute to increase it. On the other hand, increased pollution exposes individualsto a higher chance of severe symptoms increasing their probability of death due to respiratorydiseases. In order to understand how balancing the different goals in the design of effectivecontainment policies we develop a normative approach to account for their consequences onthe economy, health and the environment by analyzing the working mechanisms of socialdistancing in a pollution-extended macroeconomic-epidemiological framework with healthenvironmentfeedback effects. By limiting social contacts and thus disease incidence, socialdistancing favors health and environmental outcomes at the cost of a deterioration inmacroeconomicconditions.We show that social distancing alone is not enough to reverse the growthpattern of both disease prevalence and pollution and thus it is optimal to reduce the diseasespread even if this generates a deterioration in environmental conditions.We also extend ourbaseline model to account for the role of strategic interactions between neighbor economiesin which both pollution and disease prevalence are transboundary. In this context we showthat free-riding induces sizeable efficiency losses, quantifiable in about 5% excess diseaseprevalence and 10% excess pollution at the end of the epidemic management program in thecase of only two interacting economies.
SN 0254-5330
YR 2024
FD 2024
LK https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/70752
UL https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/70752
LA spa
NO Annals of Operations Research
DS UVaDOC
RD 22-dic-2024