Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic has other perspectives than just the epidemiological one that impacts human lives. In this chapter, we look at the economic perspective by modelling a consumer economic system with a basic supply chain and a very basic government role to create a circular economic system. People have to work at shops or workplaces to earn money to buy food or other items. These items are sold by shops who in turn buy them from workplaces. We devise multiple scenarios to compare the effects of the pandemic, measures to lessen the epidemiological effects and additional economic effects. The results show us that we can: (1) create an useful economic model in the complex ASSOCC context, (2) that from an economic perspective repeated lockdowns are more harmful than not taking any action at all, and (3) economic measures do support economic well being of the population. While it is very clear that the real world is a lot more complex than how we have modelled it, the modelling process helps us pinpoint where next steps of policy investigation, model improvement and research could be performed.
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Notes
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Recall that ASSOCC has been created in a crisis situation.
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See Sect. 3.12 for the description of Quality of Life.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the members of the ASSOCC team for their valuable contributions to this chapter. We also wish to thank Loïs Vanhée and Luis Gustavo Ludescher for their development work on the code for this chapter and their contributions to the conceptual model.
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Melchior, A. (2021). Economics During the COVID-19 Crisis: Consumer Economics and Basic Supply Chains. In: Dignum, F. (eds) Social Simulation for a Crisis. Computational Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76397-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76397-8_9
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