Bouncing forward: a resilience approach to dealing with COVID-19 and future systemic shocks

Abstract

Policy questions are often framed in popular discussion as situations where pulling the right levers will get the economy and society back on track after shocks and crises. This approach ignores how systems interact and how their systemic properties shape socioeconomic outcomes, leading to an over-emphasis on a limited set of characteristics, notably efficiency. We argue that this emphasis on efficiency in the operation, management and outcomes of various economic and social systems is not a conscious collective choice, but rather the response of the whole system to the incentives that individual components face. This has brought much of the world to rely upon complex, nested, and interconnected systems to deliver goods and services around the globe. While this approach has many benefits, the Covid-19 crisis shows how it has also reduced the resilience of key systems to shocks, and allowed failures to cascade from one system to others. This paper reviews the impact of COVID-19 on socioeconomic systems, discusses the notion of resilience, and provides specific recommendations on both integrating resilience analytics for recovery from the current crisis as well as on building resilient infrastructure to address future systemic challenges.