The unintended industrial policy benefits of COVID-19 in Africa

This chapter examines a seemingly heretical subject matter, that is, the unintended beneficial- impact of the otherwise disruptive novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease it causes code-named COVID-19 (e.g. Ssali 2020). First detected in Wuhan, China in December- 2019, COVID-19 was declared a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” on 30 January 2020 and reclassifed as a pandemic on 11 March 2020 (WHO 2020). That COVID-19 knows no social, political, gender, or racial boundaries is no longer debatable (WHO 2020). What has escaped scholarly scrutiny is the positive albeit the unintended benefcial impacts of COVID-19 (Baldwin and Eiichi 2020). Are there verifable industrial policy dividends of COVID-19?

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Published in: Routledge Handbook of Public Policy in Africa
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
See chapter on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003143840-66