Ten weeks that shook the world economy

The CoViD-19 pandemic has changed world history and sparked a huge debate among social scientists. In this work, we concentrate on the initial (two months of) institutional responses to the pandemic in the advanced economies, by analyzing the discussions in the press and in the scientific literature. These first analyses of the pandemic represent the “instinctive” and “automatic” responses of the economic profession and policymakers to the emergency, which allows for an interesting overview of the progression of events. We will synthetically discuss the economic measures taken to tackle the collapse of income and production, and the ensuing expanded new role of governments and central banks in the economy. In the appendix, we discuss the different attitudes that emerged from the articles in the first weeks of the emergency to explore the different directions that the economic debate was taking at the time.