Sébastien Bourdin (p), Fabien Nadou , Gabriel Noiret

The spread of Covid-19 is a worldwide concern, including and especially in the most developed countries where the rapid spread of the virus has taken governments by surprise. Adopting a spatial approach to the issue allows us, we identify the spatial factors that help to explain why some areas are hit harder than others, based on the Italian example (with the Lombardy region as the epicentre in Europe). Our analysis combines an autoregressive spatial model and a bivariate spatial autocorrelation from a pool of data collected from the Italian provinces. We propose a real-time analysis of the spread and concentration of the virus, as well as the related proximity effects. Our paper suggests that the most globally connected areas are also the worst hit areas. Our findings also indicate that the implementation of a lockdown at the beginning of March was a crucial and effective approach to slowing the spread of the virus further

Manas Chatterji (p)

The objectives of this presentation are to discuss the impact of thenew phenomenon of Covid-19 on the economic, social,political,andenvironmental structures of an increasingly globalized society, andthe necessity of developing a new paradigm in Disaster Managementwith Regional Science and Peace Science at its core

Tomaz Dentinho (p)

The Coronavirus (COVID-19), is spreading around the world. From a medical perspective, critical questions arise regarding containment measures, methods of diagnosis and treatment of patients and development of vaccines. From an economic policy point of view, the issue is the optimal calibration of containment measures combining saving lives with saving jobs. There are epidemic tools (Ferguson et. al., 2020) that explain infection and regional economic models (Bonet al. 2020) that look into the impact of containment policies. There are also theoretical models that allow the optimization of policies for one place (Eichenbaum et al. 2020). The aim of this paper is to formulate and estimate a model of regional economics of epidemics applied on Covid-19 for the 28 NUTS III regions of Portugal that include the health and economic spatialized impacts of infection and containment measures. The model based on an extension of the Gordon- Schaefer formula to include spatial interaction, presents interesting results for regionalized policies to address Covid-19. The paper concludes that the optimal policy should vary in space and in time.
Key words: Regional Economics of Epidemics, Covid-19, Portugal

Annie Tubadji (p)

The human right to life is an absolute right for every human being. However, the pandemic COVID-19 witnesses the urging of non-essential UK workers, such as construction and manufacturing workers, to restart work, because this is essential for the economy. The more affluent professions can still work from home. In its essence, this is an act of cultural devaluation of the life of the lower economic class of workers on the labour market, where the economic value of their lives is only considered, and their cultural right to life (which should be at place on an absolutely egalitarian principle with all other labourers) is denied to them. Given that the economic structure distributes occupations and economic class unevenly across space, reopening the economy by sectors will culturally devaluate the life in some regions more than others. Using Census 2011 and latest ONS data releases on COVID exposure by occupation, and a detailed data decomposition analysis, I show that this absolute discrimination in the human rights application to certain economic class is associated with exposure to higher risk of contagion for a category of people whose demographic characteristics identify them as the most likely victims of the uncurable disease, namely the male, above middle age people with worse health, who are also more often likely to be non-white or foreign by birth. Moreover, this lack of altruism towards a certain economic class of workers is bound to very soon acerbate the left behind feelings in the country as COVID-19 exposure will increase in regions where lower economic class of workers is concentrated. As they are also objectively more vulnerable to the disease, this will clearly increase significantly the risk and the actual numbers of COVID-19 deaths among the most left-behind areas by culturally devaluating the lives of the poorer workers. A new pocket of creating inequality by design is thus revealed.