The global health crisis, exacerbated by the COVID-19 outbreak, has challenged all sectors of society, including health, economics, finance, and social inequality. The threats and complexities from the COVID-19 pandemic shock are the core subject of this latest volume in the Contributions to Economic Analysis series. The Economics of COVID-19 contains selected contributions analysing the effects of this pandemic, covering macroeconomics, computable general equilibrium models, financial markets, the reduction in seismic noise due to the slowdown in traffic and economic activities caused by the spread of the virus, the rapid surge in the digital transformation of production and consumption. Also included are health studies proposing to improve the traditional epidemic models, the effects of the pandemic on mental health, Minority Ethnic Groups in the UK, as well as the Lombardy region in Italy. The aim of this collection is to spur much needed research into the effects of COVID on the global economy, the health, and financial sectors, as well as its effects on development and growth and economic inequality.

This volume contains an Open Access Chapter The Sustainability of Health Care Systems in Europe provides a comprehensive understanding of the sustainability of health systems in Europe. Furthermore, it includes an introduction to how EU action in supporting health- care policies in the EU Member States, looking both at implemented actions and describing current priorities for the future. There has been a rapid evolution of the structure of society and the economy over the last few decades which has created new demands for healthcare services. This has placed pressure on policy makers to ensure the sustainability of the health care sector. Policy makers understand the efficiency of the healthcare delivery system needs to be improved, the shortage of health professionals must be tackled, and that there are growing health inequalities and inequity in access to healthcare. These challenges are exacerbated by recent economic shocks including the 2008 recession, the uncertainty related to Brexit, and the crisis induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, which have impacted the ability of European health systems to finance the health care sector. This book is a must read for researchers and students of health economics and health policy.

Recent years have witnessed a dramatic surge in applied econometric work in health economics, enhanced by the availability of large micro and macro data sets as well as the rapid development of new techniques and tools in econometrics. Health economics is an important and challenging area of research for applied econometricians, due to complexity embedded in the data, arising from issues such as nonlinearity of models, the presence of individual-level unobserved heterogeneity as well as time and cross sectional dependencies. This book covers a wide range of existing and emerging topics in applied health economics. These include: behavioural economics, medical care risk, social insurance, discrete choice models, cost-effectiveness analysis, health and immigration, vignette approach, response of parental investments to child's health at birth, determinants of innovation in the pharmaceutical industry, hospital competition, use of administrative data, spatial health econometrics, health expenditure, and networks.