Working Paper: NBER ID: w28601
Authors: Maddalena Ferranna; JP Sevilla; David E. 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: COVID-19; value frameworks; utilitarianism; prioritarianism; vaccine allocation
JEL Codes: D61; I13
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Increased regressivity of COVID-19 burdens (H22) | Increased value of strict control policies under prioritarianism (D69) |
| Ethical framework employed (A13) | Allocation decisions in vaccine allocation (I18) |
| Prioritarianism (D63) | Targeting young and socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals in vaccine allocation (I14) |