IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/99983.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Thresholds of unhealthiness: Governing in the time of COVID-19

Author

Listed:
  • Cullerne Bown, William

Abstract

COVID-19 has left many governments facing questions of priority for which there is no obvious conceptual framework. When questions of politics, economics and health are so intertwined that one cannot be properly discussed without the others then neither political economy nor public health offer an adequate basis. Here I draw on principles of measurement to distil from epidemiology and economics the foundational concepts required in the current circumstances for governing. For governments determined to control their epidemic, I conclude they cannot avoid subordinating all other principles to a threshold of unhealthiness, and that these thresholds can be ordered. A corollary is a new and enduring uncertainty in all questions of policy. I illustrate different thresholds with examples from the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and New Zealand.

Suggested Citation

  • Cullerne Bown, William, 2020. "Thresholds of unhealthiness: Governing in the time of COVID-19," MPRA Paper 99983, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:99983
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/99983/1/MPRA_paper_99983.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    COVID-19; Political economy; Public health; Measurement; Utility function; Pandemic; Epidemic; Epidemiology; United Kingdom; Hong Kong; New Zealand;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C0 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - General
    • I1 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:99983. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.