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标题：Virus economics: an American tragedy
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作者：Guttmann, Robert
期刊名称：Revue de la Régulation : Capitalisme, Institutions, Pouvoirs
印刷版ISSN：1957-7796
出版年度：2021
期号：29
页码：1
出版社：revues.org
摘要：The world seemed largely distracted with more mundane matters when a new coronavirus, labeled SARS-CoV-2, appeared in late 2019 in Wuhan (China) and then, superbly adapted for human-to-human transmission, launched its planetary march of exponential spread in January 2020. We should have been better prepared for the possibility of a global pandemic even though the last such occurrence of comparable danger happened over a century ago – the “Spanish Flu” of 1918/1919. Signs of an impending pandemic have abounded in recent years, with five near misses over the last couple of decades – SARS in 2002, the bird flu in 2005, the swine flu in 2009, MERS in 2012, and Ebola in 2014/2015. This heightened threat of pandemics is consequence of stressors our modern capitalist economies have put on the environment, altering the relationship between humans and animals – the accelerating destruction of our planet’s biodiversity, erosion of wildlife habitats, animal commerce, increased meat consumption, and changing patterns of movement by certain animals key to the production of new zoonotic viruses, notably bats. The sad truth is that, even beyond the new coronavirus, the world will remain susceptible to recurrent pandemics as global threat which makes today’s experience an important trial run for future episodes 1 .
其他摘要：The global pandemic forces every country in the world into a complex set of balancing acts between virus spread containment, public health capacity, macro-economic stabilization measures, and business survival amidst depressed levels of activity. Irrespective of how countries perform under these unprecedented conditions of “virus economics”, they face a “Great Interruption” which accelerates trends and causes ruptures to the point of deepening crisis conditions. Nowhere among the richer OECD countries is this crisis process of the pandemic playing out more dramatically than in the United States where the virus is causing particular havoc. Virus economics has proven an American tragedy. Using the analytical concepts and methodological tools of Regulation Theory, notably with regard to the varieties of capitalism and on the nature of structural crises, invites the conclusion that the pandemic has caused a crisis of the accumulation regime which may alter capitalism for the better in the direction of sustainable development goals.
关键词：régime d’accumulation; crise structurelle; pandémie; économie du virus; la Grande Interruption↓régimen de acumulación; economia del virus; la Gran Interrupción; crisis estructural; pandemia
其他关键词：accumulation regime; pandemic; virus economics; The Great Interruption; structural crisis