The spread of COVID-19 shows the importance of policy coordination

Graff Zivin, J and N Sanders. "The spread of COVID-19 shows the importance of policy coordination." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117(2020): 32823-32826.

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The outbreak of COVID19 has forced communities to confront what sacrifices they are willing to make to quickly address threats to public health. A simple aggregation of costs and benefits from any policy also misses important distributional concerns. These are generally not shared equally across members of society, and burdens tend to be more lopsided in the presence of externalities. Because we tend to undervalue the benefits that accrue to others, individuals underinvest in protective measures relative to levels that are socially desirable. In this article, we articulate the importance of policy coordination in this context and offer several pragmatic suggestions to accomplish it.