Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP15904
Authors: Maddalena Ferranna; JP Sevilla; David Bloom
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has forced countries to make difficult ethical choices, e.g., how to balance public health and socioeconomic activity and whom to prioritize in allocating vaccines or other scarce medical resources. We discuss the implications of benefit-cost analysis, utilitarianism, and prioritarianism in evaluating COVID-19-related policies. The relative regressivity of COVID-19 burdens and control policy costs determines whether increased sensitivity to distribution supports more or less aggressive control policies. Utilitarianism and prioritarianism, in that order, increasingly favor income redistribution mechanisms compared with benefit-cost analysis. The concern for the worse-off implies that prioritarianism is more likely than utilitarianism or benefit-cost analysis to target young and socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals in the allocation of scarce vaccine doses.
Keywords: prioritarianism; benefit-cost analysis; utilitarianism; COVID-19 vaccine allocation; lockdown control policies
JEL Codes: D6; I1; I3
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| relative regressivity of COVID-19 burdens and control policy costs (H22) | value of strict control policies (E64) |
| prioritarianism prioritizes young and socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals in vaccine allocation (I14) | vaccine allocation (I18) |
| benefit-cost analysis favors wealthier individuals (D61) | vaccine allocation (I18) |
| prioritarianism ranks socioeconomically disadvantaged elderly individuals higher than wealthier elderly (J14) | vaccine prioritization (I14) |
| trade-offs between health and economic outcomes are mediated by the distribution of costs (I14) | health and economic outcomes (I14) |
| ethical framework choice affects policy recommendations regarding control measures and vaccine distribution (I18) | policy recommendations regarding control measures and vaccine distribution (I18) |