The Political Economy of COVID-19: Understanding the Dynamics of a Global Pandemic brilliantly uncovers the challenges which the exigencies and contingencies of the COVID-19 pandemic posed to national, international, and global political and economic institutions. It explores the ways policy, politics, and governance combined to deal with economic and social problems in a time of a unique emergency. A welcome addition to the political economy paradigm, national, international, and global studies.

Drawing upon systematic and regional case studies the authors provide new insights to the impacts of COVID-19 on the global economy. They offer a multidisciplinary political economy lens with which to view interactions between political and economic forces in the evolution of a post-pandemic world. Wide-ranging in its scope, the book draws together disparate COVID-related concerns broadly examining the ways policy, politics and governance are linked to economic outcomes. In charting the widely varied attempts to deal with the pandemic worldwide, the book identifies some commonalities as well as divergent outcomes and impacts. Several recurrent themes appear in its ten individual studies, notably societal vulnerability, the nature of post-pandemic recovery, and the challenges facing the post-pandemic world. With twelve of the fifteen contributors coming from Africa, the African experience is prominent in the analyses, helping to confer a distinctive flavour to the content. This is a valuable contribution to COVID studies with important lessons for policy-makers and institutions as well as scholars attempting to understand the emerging new political economy of the global order.