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The Spanish Flu 1918–1920 saw a high degree of excess mortality among young and healthy adults. The purpose of this paper is a further exploration of the hypothesis that high mortality risk during The Spanish Flu in Copenhagen was associated with early life exposure to The Russian Flu 1889–1892.

Based on 37,000 individual-level death records in a new unique database from The Copenhagen City Archives combined with approximate cohort-specific population totals interpolated from official censuses of population, the author compiles monthly time series on all-cause mortality rates 1916–1922 in Copenhagen by gender and one-year birth cohorts. The author then analyses birth cohort effects on mortality risk during The Spanish Flu using regression analysis.

The author finds support for hypotheses relating early life exposure to The Russian Flu to mortality risk during The Spanish Flu. Some indications of possible gender heterogeneity during the first wave of The Spanish Flu – not found in previous studies – should be a topic for future research based on data from other countries.

Due to lack of individual-level death records with exact dates of birth and death, previous studies on The Spanish Flu in Denmark and many other countries have relied on data with lower birth cohort resolutions than the one-year birth cohorts used in this study. The analysis in this paper illustrates how archival Big Data can be used to gain new insights in studies on historical pandemics.

The aim of this chapter is to study catastrophic pandemics which have occurred in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and their disruptive impact on tourism mobility. A detailed study of past pandemics is conducted starting from the black death or bubonic plague of 1346 to the recent COVID-19 outbreak and effect of these diseases on the tourism and economy of the infected countries. Studies show that influenza pandemics will prove to be the most dangerous in future, and the next outbreak could occur from any of the 16 known HA (haemagglutinin) subtypes. Also, it is found that tourism itself has been responsible for spread of pandemic outbreaks as countries around the world put an enormous emphasis on increased growth of tourist numbers. Among recent pandemics, it was severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) that caused the major decrease in international tourist arrivals although for a short term. Such pandemics have a negative effect on tourism destinations by damaging their image and competitiveness, and as a result, leading to disruptions in mobility of tourists, with Asian countries being the most at risk of such disruptions. Therefore, the findings of this study stress the need for pre-crisis management to handle such outbreaks, better traveller tracking system to check infected persons and the need for tourism destinations to diversify their economies to reduce dependency on tourism.

The war in Iraq, the threat of terrorism and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic have made international business activities increasingly difficult and risky. The worldwide economic downturn and slow growth in domestic markets are forcing companies to depend more than ever on overseas trade. SARS emerged in China in November 2002 and has spread to 26 countries. The SARS epidemic has caused the most severe economic crisis in Southeast Asia since the wave of bank failures and currency devaluations that swept the region five years ago. The SARS epidemic has prompted health officials to implement travel advisories and restrictions, in order to defer nonessential travel to regions of Asia with large numbers of SARS cases. They are enforcing quarantine and isolation measures in major cities to try and limit the spread of SARS. The President of the United States has signed an executive order adding SARS to the list of communicable diseases that can be quarantined. A major disruption in China could paralyze just‐in‐time supply chains and cause an economic crisis for retailers and other businesses worldwide. The SARS epidemic has caused many economists to drastically reduce their economic‐growth forecasts for Asia. New infectious diseases, such as SARS, can emerge and easily travel around the globe, infecting less‐resilient hosts and mutating because of the influence of viruses and bacteria in their new environment. Health officials are even more concerned about the pandemic disaster that hasn’t happened, but may still. However, the SARS epidemic has created positive economic benefits for some companies.

This paper aims to use the advertisements of three major brands – Chymol, Formamint and Lifebuoy Soap – to examine how advertisers responded to the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic in Great Britain influenza pandemic. It looks particularly at the ways in which marketing strategies changed and how these strategies were enacted in the lexical and semiotic choices (e.g. language, image, colour, typography, texture, materiality, composition and layout) of advertisements.

A total of 120 advertisements for the three brands were collected from the British Newspaper Archive and analysed using the theory and analytical tools of multimodal critical discourse analysis. The general themes and semiotic structures of the advertisements were identified, with the aim of deconstructing the meaning potentials of verbal and visual resources used to convey ideas about the pandemic, and how they work to shape public understanding of the products and make them appear as effective and credible.

Each brand rapidly changed their marketing strategy in response to the influenza pandemic, using such techniques as testimonials, hyperbole, scaremongering and pseudoscientific claims to persuade consumers that their products offered protection. Whilst these strategies may appear manipulative, they also had the function of fostering reassurance and sympathy amongst the general public in a moment of turmoil, indicating the important role of brands in building consumer trust and promoting a sense of authority in early twentieth-century Britain.

Exploring the way in which advertisers responded to the 1918‐1919 influenza pandemic reminds us of the challenges of distinguishing legitimate and illegitimate medical advice in a fast-moving pandemic and highlights the need to cast a critical eye to the public health information, particularly when it comes from unofficial sources with vested interests.

The outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is an unprecedented shock to the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) economy and their financial markets have plummeted significantly due to it. This paper adds to the recent literature on contagion due to spillover by uniquely examining the presence of pairwise contagion or volatility transmissions in stock markets returns of India, Brazil, Russia, China and USA prior to and during COVID-19 pandemic period.

In this study, the generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) by Bollerslev (1986) under diagonal parameterization is used to estimate multivariate GARCH framework also known as BEKK (Baba EngleKraft and Kroner) model on stock market returns of BRIC nations and the US.

The empirical results show that the model captures the volatility spillovers and display statistical significance for own past mean and volatility with both short- and long-run persistence effects. Own volatility spillovers (Heatwave phenomenon) have been found to be highest for the US, China and Brazil compared to Russia and India. The coefficients indicate persistence of volatility for each country in terms of its own past errors. The highest and long-term spillover effect is found between US and Russia. The results recommend that Russia is least vulnerable to outside shocks. Finally after examining the pairwise results, it is suggested that the BRIC countries stock indices have exhibited volatility spillover due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study may be extended to include other emerging market economies under a dynamic framework.

Researchers and policymakers may draw useful insights on cross-market interdependencies regarding the spillovers in BRIC countries' stock markets. It also helps design international portfolio diversification strategies and in constructing optimal portfolios during COVID and in a post-COVID world.

COVID-19 has been an improbable event in the history of the world which can have a large impact on the financial economies across the emerging countries. This event can be deemed to be informative enough to measure the co-movements of the equity markets amongst cross-country return series, which has not been investigated so far for BRIC nations.

The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of variability of empirical results of several financial contagion studies, taking into account the role of financial markets, data sets and the applied definitions and methods that may explain the variability of empirical evidence.

The authors used qualitative analysis of published research materials about previous financial crises and analyzed the variability of empirical results of around 75 studies of financial contagion, taking into account the particularities of financial markets, data sets and tests methods.

The results of the analysis show that empirical studies provide heterogeneous results depending on applied definitions and methods, as well as chosen crises, destination countries and financial indices. Summing up all the relevant empirical findings the results supporting the contagion hypothesis are in clear dominance, but taking into account differences in definitions and testing methodologies the research did not reveal clear results as to which evidence dominates or should dominate.

The authors conclude that solely qualitative analysis of published research materials about previous financial crises does not give sufficient information to elaborate proper management measures to prevent serious consequences of financial crises. The authors propose that it is possible to obtain a more adequate picture of financial contagion by using a meta‐analysis, which the authors are planning to do in future studies.

The paper provides information about some reasons that explain the variability of the results that are presented in the empirical studies about financial contagion. This information can be used for elaborating policy proposals and regulations that can help alleviate possible negative consequences of financial contagion. The paper shows the way for future articles summarising financial contagion.

The study sums up previous findings on the field of financial contagion and shows the insufficiency of the traditional literature review to accomplish that task.

Nigeria remains the largest economy in Africa. However, its health sector is described as weak. It continues to battle several challenges ranging from poor health infrastructure, inaccessibility of good quality health care, corruption, substandard drugs circulating, poor funding, shortage of healthcare personnel, high cost of healthcare amidst poverty-stricken masses, among others. The outbreak of Covid-19 and the global oil price crash have further impacted Nigeria’s dwindling healthcare service delivery/indicators. This chapter thus takes stock of the status of the healthcare indicators, healthcare systems, and healthcare governance in Nigeria before and during the Covid-19 pandemic to decipher the impact of the damage caused by Covid-19 on the already weak Nigeria’s health sector. It discusses healthcare indicators, system constraints and responses, and the demand and supply of health care in Nigeria in the era of Covid-19. This chapter shows how Covid-19 has negatively and positively affected the healthcare sector in Nigeria. However, the negative impact remains overwhelming and has potentially grave consequences. This study thus develops a policy framework and time-tested strategy to recover Nigeria’s health sector while factoring in the present capabilities of Nigeria’s health sector. This study thus recommends that adequate infrastructure investment and welfare for healthcare workers are important for the recovery of Nigeria’s health sector.

This paper aims to examine the impact of health and other exogenous shocks on stock markets in Africa. Particularly, the authors examined the resilience of the major stock markets in 12 African economies during the recent global pandemic.

This paper uses the recent panel vector autoregressive model, which enables us to capture the response of stock markets to shocks in COVID-19, commodity markets and exchange rate. For robustness, the authors also analysed the panel Granger causality test. Data was obtained for the period ranging from 2 January 2020 to 31 December 2020.

The results show that the growth in COVID-19 cases and deaths do not have any substantial impact on the stock market returns of these economies. In terms of commodity markets, the authors find that gold price has a negative contemporaneous effect on stock returns, but the effect fizzles out around the fifth day while crude oil price, on the other hand, has a significant positive simult aneous impact on stock returns and also converges around the fifth day. The authors further find that the exchange rate has a contemporaneous and nonlinear effect on stock returns and seems to be more dramatic when compared with the other variables. Overall, the results show that stock markets in Africa appear to be flexible and resilient against the COVID-19 outbreak but are affected by other exogenous shocks such as volatile commodity prices and the foreign exchange market. The effect is, however, short-lived – between one to five days.

Following the study’s findings, policies should be put in place to support financial markets by way of hedging against commodity instability and securing domestic currency financing. Policymakers are also recommended to concentrate on managing the uncertainties around their exchange rate markets and develop robust and efficient domestic financial markets to encourage local and foreign investors.

Several studies have been carried out on the effects of disasters (such as the COVID-19 pandemic) on stock markets, but only a few studies have examined the resilience of stock markets to health and other exogenous shocks. This study’s attempt is not only to examine the impact of COVID-19 health shocks on stock markets but also to analyse the resilience of the sampled stock markets. The authors also analyse the resilience of stock markets to commodity markets and exchange rates shocks.

Governance involves the maintenance and improvement of the quality of life and safety of the people. It is a collaborative process that describes the cooperative efforts of all levels of government to ensure that the people enjoy a decent living and are protected from disasters and outbreaks such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, the world is facing a new normal arrangement in almost all the economic and social sectors because of restrictions that are brought about by the pandemic with severe challenges on governance and public service delivery. There is an increasing need, therefore, for policymakers to adjust the pattern of public service delivery and policy formulations to curtail the spread of the virus amidst several conspiracies. This chapter adopts the conspiracy theory to explain how the disbelief concerning the existence of the virus promotes its spread in the workplace and the need to embrace and enhance digital transformations in areas such as teleworking, flexible working, health and safety at the workplace, and work-life balance, for optimal service delivery. Data for this chapter were generated through the review of extant literature. The paper makes relevant recommendations for policymakers, managers and administrators in this dispensation and beyond.