key: cord-0828003-iettqb1r
authors: Noland, Marcus
title: Comment on “Economic Impacts of SARS/MERS/COVID‐19 in Asian Countries”
date: 2021-09-02
journal: Asian Economic Policy Review
DOI: 10.1111/aepr.12370
sha: 908ceb0ae5d5e5f2fec0dbf173b74288544604fb
doc_id: 828003
cord_uid: iettqb1r

nan

progress will be complicated by the apparent need to give booster shots. Thus far, Asia has been relatively strong on NPIs, but relatively weak on vaccine rollout.

There are two core issues: first, the social benefit of vaccination exceeds its private benefit at the level of the individual, and the global benefit exceeds the national benefit at the level of the nation-state. Consequently, there is a prima facie case for the subsidization of production and consumption at the national and global levels. A related issue is distributional: we face an emerging "vaccine famine." In famines, people do not die because there is not enough food to go around in a physical sense; they die because they are too poor to purchase adequate supplies. "Vaccine nationalism" in which a limited number of producer countries impose export controls, or pre-emptively purchase huge stocks for their citizenry, will leave vast swaths of the world's population, including in Asia, exposed. Unvaccinated populations can act as incubators for the development of variants of concern. Bown and Bollyky (2021) propose a COVID-19 Vaccine an Investment Trade Agreement (CVITA) to leverage COVAX; subsidize investment in vaccine production and the related supply chain; eschew export restrictions; create a transparent monitoring system; and create an authority to act as contractor and ombudsman.

Tanaka documents the uneven incidence of the pandemic burden across households; similar inequities are arising in vaccine distribution within countries, particularly in countries characterized by high levels of inequality and ethnic or other social tensions. This could prove particularly challenging in parts of Southeast Asia. A related issue is vaccine hesitancy. This phenomenon has been particularly vexing in countries with populist leaders such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro or Rodrigo Duterte.

Attainment of herd immunity will determine the length of the pandemic and the magnitude of scarring. As Tanaka observes, duration also is relevant to the preferability of providing support to firms (as has been emphasized by the European Union) or support to individual households and workers (as has been emphasized in the USA). The former preserves the enterprise value of firms at the risk of creating zombies; the latter is advisable if considerable cross-sectoral redeployment of resources is necessary but may incur the cost of firm shutdown needlessly if the shock is temporary.

The risk is that without an effective global pandemic response, we could find ourselves in a world of recurrent outbreaks, inevitably prompting the imposition of cross-border impediments to the movement of goods and people, with adverse implications for long-run productivity, economic growth, and poverty alleviation.

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Economic impacts of SARS/MERS/COVID-19 in Asian countries