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How long will China continue to try to eliminate COVID? A change of strategy is not very likely, argue Hao Zha (Tsinghua), Yuxi Zhang (LSE), and Thomas Hale (Oxford) who collect and analyse China’s data for the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker.

An aspect of the media landscape that has been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic has been the increasing role of media organisations in presenting and undertaking their own, often complex, data analyses. In this cross-post Irineo Cabreros, discusses the the potential risks posed by this trend and what journalists could learn from academic researchers to safeguard the quality of their work.

COVID-19 has transformed academic publishing, for books and journals. In this post Min Pun, shares his experiences as editor of two journals in Nepal. He outlines some of the opportunities posed by COVID-19, including the increased demand for research. However, there are also multiple barriers to the production and dissemination of knowledge in Nepal, including lack of funding for open access publishing and an increasing reliance on secondary evidence.

Across Africa, states have adapted or expanded social protection measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These interventions provide valuable policy lessons and political opportunities to reimagine the social contract on the continent.

Trade recovered quickly after 2008 because the collapse wasn't long enough for firms to dismantle their portfolios, writes Giordano Mion

California’s ‘superstar’ cities and regions – which together make up nearly 90 percent of the state’s GDP – have experienced the highest number of COVID-19 cases. Maliha Ahmed writes that despite being hard hit, these superstar areas have a combination of industries which have been less affected by the pandemic compared to those in poorer areas. With both superstar and non-superstar areas experiencing nearly equal increases in unemployment since February, she argues that policymakers will need to target assistance to poorer areas to prevent rising inequality.

In countries experiencing the frontline effects of climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to ever-increasing needs for mental health support, exacerbating the impacts of financial and food insecurity. The national provision of these services in Benin, however, is inadequate to treat the population, yet stigmatisation remains a barrier to rethinking current practices.

The COVID-19 pandemic, allied with the worsening climate crisis, have increased the pressure on governments and societies to help people cope. Anita Allen, the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, has an important reminder: to deal with pandemics, climate change, and inequalities, we need to accommodate people with mental health disorders. Professor Allen gave a brief “walk and talk” interview to LSE Business Review’s managing editor, Helena Vieira, during the World Economic Forum’s Great Narrative Meeting in Dubai.

The 19th century French political thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed that in America, motivation almost universally came from self-interest understood in a new way, rather than from virtue, which was often the case in European aristocracies. Jeffrey K. Tulis writes that the COVID-19 pandemic has seen deviations from this tendency, with a rise in both brute selfish and virtuous behavior. He attributes this mutation of American “self-interest rightly understood” to the decay of democracy, and the rise of white supremacy and anti-democratic sentiments.