COVID-19 2020: A year of living dangerously

Abstract

Numerous and complex policy challenges have emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic. These range from dealing with the direct impacts in terms of treating the virus and managing its spread, dealing with the pandemic’s knock-on effects (including economic impacts from falling production, rising unemployment and changing working arrangements) through to managing the broader social and psychological impacts from the social isolation and social divisions triggered by the pandemic and governments’ policy responses to it. In the light of these policy challenges, this article surveys the behavioural economic policy contributions collected together in the Journal of Behavioral Economics for Policy (JBEP)’s 2020 COVID-19 Special Issue series. This article also explores some of the broader behavioural economic policy lessons relevant to the management of pandemics now and in the future and sets out some of the key policy challenges around managing the tensions between individual interests and communal interests illuminated by the pandemic and its consequences.