INDIA, March 11 -- NOBODY expects the Spanish influenza. Or the Bubonic plague. Even so, pestilential panics like Covid-19 come along every so often, and they sometimes become full-blown levellers of humanity. Thankfully, the so-called coronavirus appears to be nothing like the 14th century's Black Death.
But going by what happened following deadlier prior outbreaks, "plague-enomics" can still lead to farreaching structural shifts.
European economies changed dramatically in the years that followed the arrival on Genoese merchant ships in 1347 - and regular reappearance - of the Black Death. It wiped out more than half the residents of Florence, Paris and Hamburg, and took decades for the European population to recover. The ensuing major s...