Household, family, and community responses to the direct costs of epidemics

This introduction to the special issue concisely takes us through some of the different strands of literature on the economic impacts of epidemics. One of the most dominant macroeconomic frameworks has been the emphasis on aggregate redistribution of wages and assets through a realignment of population and resources, often based on the case of the Black Death. In more recent times, further research at the level of individual communities has suggested that mortality-induced economic redistribution during other epidemics was more variable and connected to structural factors such as inheritance practices and institutional constraints that limited wealth transfer and asset fragmentation. In this special issue, and emphasised in this introduction, we refer to a third framework played out at the micro-level within individual households, families, and communities. We reflect on the direct costs that epidemics could create and whether financial burdens could offset any of the other potential economic ‘opportunities’ for survivors. At the end of the introduction, we introduce the main findings from late-medieval Flanders and Catalonia, early modern Holland and Transylvania, industrialising Germany, and the contemporary United Kingdom, and how these findings relate to the overarching theme on micro-level economic impacts of epidemics.