Fields partners with OECD, McMaster to create International Program on Systemic Recovery from COVID-19
Over the past year, the impacts of COVID-19 have destabilized far more than public health. From the economic strain of lockdown, to global mental health struggles and the inequitable deficits in children’s education, many nations won’t be able to fully assess the fallout until we’ve gotten a handle on the virus.
Recordings
Symposium: http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/activities/20-21/systemic-symposium
Panel Discussion: https://oecdtv.webtv-solution.com/7563/or/naec_virtual_conference_a_systemic_recovery.html
With parts of Canada experiencing a brutal third wave, tackling these systemic issues can feel like performing repairs a runaway train. It’s up to independent organizations to lend their collective expertise to the early planning for systemic recovery. The hope is that the identification of critical problems, the collaborative effort to define them and chart out potential solutions, and the opportunity to share these ideas with the public will contribute to a promising head start.
The Fields Institute has partnered with McMaster University, UK-based research initiative Rebuilding Macroeconomics, l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to create a three-week Focus Program on Systemic Recovery that will delve into crucial lessons from COVID-19, modelling, analysis and policy implications.
From April 5 – 23, we're running an Extended Problem Solving Workshop comprised of graduate students and postdocs working with faculty members to tackle problems that include:
- The effectiveness of policy interventions in different countries and lessons for the future
- Business closures in the time of COVID
- COVID and Global Capital Flows
- The need for a new class of crises models
The Program will conclude with two public-facing events featuring world-renowned experts in fields such as economics, finance, engineering and media.
From April 26-27, we will host a Symposium that will consist of four sessions of invited talks on the themes such as Exit Strategies and managing The Long Haul. In each session, a moderator will introduce the theme and the key modelling and policy questions and ask the three to four speakers to present their remarks, followed by a discussion and further questions from the audience.
On April 28, the Program will conclude with a Panel Discussion featuring speakers that include (pictured above) Mark Carney (United Nations, World Economic Forum), Rana Foroohar (Financial Times, CNN), Paul Krugman (CUNY, New York Times), and Mariana Mazzucato (UCL).
Read McMaster's official press release below
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International symposium tackles economic impact of COVID-19
April 21, 2021 – International economists, mathematicians and epidemiologists are tackling some of the most perplexing and troubling economic questions of the pandemic in an upcoming symposium co-organized by a McMaster researcher and expert of financial mathematics.
The Symposium on Systemic Recovery , which takes place April 26 and 27, is run by the Fields Institute for Research of Mathematical Sciences, an international centre for mathematical research activity involving researchers from all over the world, based at the University of Toronto.
Leading experts will analyze and consider: lessons learned from the pandemic, reopening economies as vaccines are distributed widely and how various countries managed the outbreak very differently, some sacrificing lives to save the economy, others focusing on strict lockdown and public health measures, at the cost of the economy.
“It seems clear that Covid-19 was more than just a pandemic, but rather a combination of several crises, what some researchers are calling a syndemic, or a synergy of epidemics. It was also very unequal across different countries, and we want to understand why,” says Matheus Grasselli, a professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at McMaster and co-organizer of the symposium.
“On the other hand, a shock of this magnitude is an opportunity for an economic and social renaissance, rather than simply going back to normal, and the symposium will try to define what this renaissance might look like,” he says.
In the lead up to the symposium, dozens of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows are participating in a problem-solving workshop which focus on four key problems proposed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Bank of Canada, the Canadian Securities Transition Office (CSTO) and the federal Ministry of Finance.
Students are analyzing reams of data on issues related to how various countries fared during the pandemic, how do we prepare for the next unknown crisis possibly related to climate change or natural disaster, government stimulus and money flow from country to country, and issues related to Canadian business bankruptcy rates which have confounded the experts.
“Traditional economics measures, typically reported monthly or even quarterly, can't respond quickly enough to the kinds of rapid changes we have been seeing in the time of the pandemic, and sometimes give misleading information. Business insolvencies in Canada dropped in 2020 while the economy contracted, contradicting our anecdotal experience,” explains Tom Hurd, a professor of mathematics at McMaster.
One project in the workshop aims to construct a non-traditional index that monitors business activity in different regions of Canada in real time, based on diverse kinds of data derived from a large number of corporate websites. A tool like this would immediately respond to effects such as a change in COVID lockdown policy, he explains.
During the symposium, the graduate students and postdocs will also have the opportunity to present their findings to some of the world’s leading economic experts. Weijie Pang, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics is working on the problem proposed by the CTSO on issues of economic sustainability.
“Although mainstream thinking suggests that the economy always returns to an equilibrium, there is concern that for countries like Canada, the policy responses to Covid-19, coupled with trade deficits, and financial flows from much bigger economies like the United States can push our economy away from equilibrium and into unsustainability, for example leading to another housing bubble or an inflation crisis,” she says.
The program will be capped off with a high-profile Panel Discussion with Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, Mariana Mazzucato, an economist at the University College London, and others, hosted by the OECD on April 28.
