Calendrier du 07 septembre 2020
Régulation et Environnement
Du 07/09/2020 de 12:00 à 13:00
online
SCHUBERT Katheline (PSE&Paris1)
Prevention and Mitigation of Epidemics: Biodiversity Conservation and Confinement Policies
écrit avec E. Augeraud-Véron, G. Fabbbri
This paper presents a first model integrating the relation between biodiversity loss and zoonose
pandemic risks in a general equilibrium dynamic economic set-up. The occurrence of pandemics
is modeled as Poissonian leaps in economic variables. The planner can intervene in the economic
and epidemiological dynamics in two ways: first (prevention), by deciding to preserve a greater
quantity of biodiversity, thus decreasing the probability of a pandemic occurring, and second
(mitigation), by reducing the death toll through a confinement policy. The class of social welfare
functional considered has, as polar cases, a total utilitarian and an average utilitarian
specifications. It implicitly considers, at the same time, the effects of policies on mortality and on
the productive capacity of the country. Thanks to the Epstein-Zin specification of preferences, we
disantangle risk aversion and fluctuation aversion. The model is explicitly solved and the optimal
policy completely described. The qualitative dependence of the optimal policy on natural,
productivity and preference parameters is discussed. In particular the optimal lockdown is shown
to be more severe in societies valuing more human life, and the optimal biodiversity conservation
is shown to be more relevant for more “forward looking” societies, with a small discount rate and
a high degree of altruism towards individuals of future generations. We also show that societies
accepting a large welfare loss to mitigate the pandemics are also societies doing a lot of
prevention. After calibrating the model with COVID-19 pandemic data we compare the mitigation
efforts predicted by the model with those of the recent literature and we study the optimal
prevention-mitigation policy mix.