School of Business, Macau University of Science and Technology, Taipa, Macau.
Health Econ. 2022 Sep;31(9):2050-2071. doi: 10.1002/hec.4564. Epub 2022 Jun 30.
Governments worldwide have issued massive amounts of debt to inject fiscal stimulus during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper analyzes fiscal responses to an epidemic, in which interactions at work increase the risk of disease and mortality. Fiscal policies, which are designed to borrow against the future and provide transfers to individuals suffering economic hardship, can facilitate consumption smoothing while reduce hours worked and hence mitigate infections. We examine the optimal fiscal policy and characterize the condition under which fiscal policy improves social welfare. We then extend the model analyzing the static and dynamic pecuniary externalities under scale economies-the decrease in labor supply during the epidemic lowers the contemporaneous average wage rate while enhances the post-epidemic workforce health and productivity. We suggest that fiscal policy may not work effectively unless the government coordinates working time, and the optimal size of public debt is affected by production technology and disease severity and transmissibility.
在 COVID-19 大流行期间，各国政府发行了大量债务以注入财政刺激。本文分析了对传染病的财政反应，其中工作中的相互作用增加了疾病和死亡率的风险。旨在利用未来借款并向遭受经济困难的个人提供转移支付的财政政策，可以促进消费平滑，同时减少工作时间，从而减轻感染。我们研究了最优财政政策，并描述了财政政策改善社会福利的条件。然后，我们扩展模型分析了规模经济下的静态和动态货币外部性-传染病期间劳动力供应的减少降低了同期平均工资率，同时增强了传染病后的劳动力健康和生产力。我们认为，除非政府协调工作时间，否则财政政策可能无法有效发挥作用，而且最优公共债务规模受到生产技术和疾病严重程度和传染性的影响。
