Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics Emeritus and a former dean of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Senior Advisor to General Atlantic, and Chairman of the firm’s Global Growth Institute. He serves on the Academic Committee at Luohan Academy, and chairs the Advisory Board of the Asia Global Institute. He was chairman of the independent Commission on Growth and Development, an international body that from 2006-10 analyzed opportunities for global economic growth, and is the author of The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World (Macmillan Publishers, 2012).
MILAN – The coronavirus has a chokehold on the global economy. Like many friends and colleagues in China, I, too, have been locked down, along with the rest of Italy. Many of my fellow citizens in the United States are now in the same situation; others around the world will follow suit soon enough.
Because the virus can apparently be transmitted by those without symptoms, it has spread widely and under the radar of public-health authorities. To prevent health systems from being overwhelmed, aggressive social-distancing and self-isolation measures have been broadly implemented and accepted by the public. Whether they will slow the rate of transmission and limit the number of critical cases in the West remains to be seen.
Evidence that the epidemic has been curtailed or even contained in China and some other Asian economies is promising. These countries, however, relied not just on social distancing, but also on a vast array of tools that have not been extensively deployed in Europe and the US: widespread testing, contact tracing, mandated isolation, and so forth.
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