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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.

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.

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.

We find evidence that the runs on banks and trust companies in the Panic of 1907 were linked to the Bank of England’s contractionary monetary policy actions taken in 1906 and 1907 through the medium of copper prices. Results from our vector autoregressive models and copper stockpile data support our argument that a copper commodity price channel may have been active in transmitting the Bank’s policy to the New York markets. Archival evidence suggests that the plunge in copper prices may have partially triggered both the initiation and the failure of an attempt to corner the shares of United Copper, and in turn, the bank and trust company runs related to that transaction’s failure. We suggest that the substantial short-term uncertainties accompanying the development of the copper-intensive electrical and telecommunications industries likely played a role in the plunge in copper prices. Additionally, we find evidence that the copper price transmission mechanism was also likely active in five other countries that year. While we do not argue that copper caused the 1907 crisis, we suggest that it was an active policy transmission channel amplifying the classic effect that was already spreading through the money market channel. If the bust in copper prices partially triggered the 1907 panic, then it provides additional evidence that contractionary monetary policy may have had an unintended, adverse consequence of contributing to a bank panic and, therefore, supports other recent findings that monetary policy deliberations might benefit from considering the policy impact on asset prices.

Using intraday prices for the S&P 500 and Nikkei Stock Average stock indexes and aggregate trading volume for the New York and Tokyo Stock Exchanges, we show how short-run comovements between national stock market returns vary over time in a way related to the trading volume and liquidity in those markets. We frame our analysis in the context of the heterogeneous-agent models of trading developed by Campbell, Grossman and Wang (1993) and Blume, Easley and O’Hara (1994) and Wang (1994) which predict that trading volume acts as a signal of the information content of a given price move. While we find that there exists significant short-run dependence in returns and volatility between Japan and the U.S., we offer new evidence that these return “spillovers” are sensitive to interactions with trading volume in those markets. The cross-market effects with volume are revealed in both close-to-open and open-to-close returns and often exhibit non-linear patterns that are not predicted by theory.

This paper provides evidence of financial linkages across countries as a channel of contagion of currency crises in the case of the 1997 Asian crisis using high-frequency data, focusing on the hardest hit countries in the region: Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Korea. Stock markets in the region were found to play an important role in transmitting initial and local shocks beyond its country of origin to other emerging economies during the 1997 crisis. Stock market linkages seem to have contributed importantly to the quick and wide-scale contagion of the ensuing exchange rate crisis across countries in the 1997 Asian crisis episode.

This article discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic affects the demand and preferences of tourists in Russia. Tourists are the important part of the tourism industry, the most affected by COVID-19, because they are not only limited in moving and free choice of vacation destinations but also experience the economic consequences of the pandemic. However, the industry has already adapted to the current realities of the pandemic period, and tourists largely accept closed borders, mandatory vaccination requirements and PCR tests as an integral part of a modern tourist trip.

In Russia, the tourism industry has received a significant development boost despite the expected crisis consequences. The efforts of the authorities to stimulate domestic tourism and the lack of alternatives for vacations contributed to the fact that in 2020–2021 the domestic tourist flow increased by several times.

Article is aimed at studying the changes in tourist motivation and preferences of Russian tourists made by ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. However, will Russians still want to travel across their country after the pandemic is over? And what is currently influencing their choice of vacation forms and destinations? The survey revealed changes in the tourists' choice of vacation destinations, preferences in forms of activity and duration of travel, decrease of interest in package tours and rise of individual trips as well as the stable degree of satisfaction with vacations in Russia.

To answer this question, we examined the results of public opinion survey, carried out by All-Russian Centre for the Public Opinion Study and Association of Russian Tour operators. To confirm these results, we conducted own tourist opinion survey and analysed reviews on popular travel platforms in Russia. Today the tourism industry is in uncertainty and it is impossible to predict its development and tourist motivation in long-term perspective. This makes the study promising for continuation in the long term.

The twenty-first-century virus outbreak caused by COVID-19 is playing a significant role in people's lives all over the world. According to the latest data (23 November), 58,751,191 people have already been infected, and 1,389,770 have died across the globe (JHU CSSE COVID-19 Dashboard, 2020). As far as the Russian Federation is concerned, 2,096,749 people have already been infected (23 November) and there are 36,192 confirmed deaths from COVID-19 (JHU CSSE COVID-19 Dashboard, 2020). This pandemic has affected different spheres, including travelling. The main purpose of this chapter is to analyze how Russian respondents perceive the impact that the coronavirus has had on their perceptions of safety, travel and leisure plans and activities. Based on a sample of almost 300 respondents, who took part in an online questionnaire, it was possible to conclude that Russian residents consider that travelling abroad is riskier than travelling within Russia.

The globalization of the world, in addition to obvious advantages, also brings potential problems. According to the authors, the problem is that the crisis phenomena occur simultaneously and in a very similar way in different countries. The emphasis on comparing the economic crises of the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries was caused by common features such as political instability, declining living standards, severe pandemics that swept the world and their consequences (twentieth-century coronavirus and Spanish flu of the twenty-first century). Comparative analysis allows assessing the causes of crises and their consequences. The importance of studying the 2020s crisis is that this crisis has become the most painful since the Global Great Depression in the 1930s.

The novelty is determined in the analysis of the situation of the economic crisis of the 2020s. The materials of the article are of the theoretical value for researchers studying crisis phenomena and anti-crisis measures, government bodies and business representatives.