Coronacrisis and Coronabonds: Europe’s Survival Game

Abstract

The entire planet lives in a global crisis. It started as a local health problem in a Chinese city and became rapidly a world pandemic. Yet, pandemics are far from new throughout history. Bubonic Plague (known as Black Death) also arrived from China and decimated half of Europe's population from 1346 to 1351. Cholera pandemics occurred seven times from 1817 to 1961. Spanish Flu of 1918 killed almost 40 mn people within three years, twice as much as the First World War. AID Syndrome started in 1982 and killed some 1 m people only in 2018, according to the WHO. More recently, in 2014 the Ebola virus disease terrified the world with a fatality rate of 50%. What is new about the actual health crisis is not its duration, neither the number of cases, nor the number of deaths. Coronavirus hits 213 countries (20 more than the UN member states) creating socio-economic problems to all of them, to a different extent. Overall, the negative impact of corona-crisis refer both to the supply side (due to the broken international chains of value) and the demand side (due to the income losses of all those who lost their jobs or incomes).