Analysis

The Covid crisis inspired extraordinary innovation. Carsten Fink and Reinhilde Veugelers are two of the editors of a new ebook from CEPR called Resilience and Ingenuity that examines how countries, organisations and industries were able to innovate. Tim Phillips asks them what worked, what didn’t, and whether we can keep up the pace of new ideas. 

The federal government provided $296 billion in disaster relief for catastrophic events in the US between 2001 and 2019. However, excessive bailouts may encourage economic activity to remain in exposed areas. This column shows that increased post-disaster efforts due to political motives result in more people living in hazard-prone coastal regions. A dynamic spatial general equilibrium model predicts that current post-disaster policies improve aggregate welfare at the expense of overall GDP and productivity losses, and encourage sorting into exposed areas.

Recorded live at CEPR Paris Symposium 2022: Across Europe and beyond, populist movements have recently flourished. What does history teach us about the economic impact of populism – and is our taste for populists a bug or a feature of democracy? Tim Phillips talks to Moritz Schularick and Massimo Morelli.

How has the global innovation system fared in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis? A new eBook untangles how the COVID-19 shock affected innovation ecosystems in different parts of the world and how scientists, entrepreneurs, and creative professionals responded to the shock. Innovation not only proved crucial in finding solutions to the crisis, overall the innovation system proved more resilient to the pandemic’s fallout compared to previous crises.