Shirley Johnson-Lans, Professor Emerita of Economics, is the editor and a contributing author of The Coronavirus Pandemic and Inequality: A Global Perspective, recently published by Palgrave Macmillan. Two other Vassar Economics Department faculty members, Vera Brusentsev and Gisella Kagy, are also contributing chapter authors.

Described as “bringing together healthcare issues and possible policy remedies, this book examines the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the degree of inequality in wellbeing (income and wealth, health, access to health care, employment, and education) in a number of different countries around the globe. The effect of socioeconomic inequality within a country on the outcome of the pandemic is also considered. This book studies the differential effects of Covid based on location, age, income, education, gender, race/ethnicity, and immigrant status. Special attention is devoted to indigenous populations and those who are institutionalized. The short- and long-term effects of public policy developed to deal with the pandemic’s fallout are studied, as are the effects of the pandemic on innovations in health care systems and likely extensions of public policy instituted during the pandemic to alleviate unemployment, poverty, and income inequality.”