L’économie au temps de la pan­dé­mie. Leçons et rap­pels

The Covid-19 pandemic calls for a contracyclical policy support of great magnitude. It would be a waste of not infinite means not using it in a way to simultaneously reallocate resources in a sense that was already clearly identified prior to the crisis, starting with environmental sustainability. In addition, both policy and theoretical lessons from the crisis have to be drawn. The paper addresses ten issues: (1) the sense of economic forecasts at times of an unanticipated major crisis; (2) the art of cost-benefit analysis applied to public health trade-offs; (3) rules of the market economy game lacking consistency to the advantage of shareholders; (4) the compatibility between urgency and structural reforms; (5) the conflict between cost compression and business resilience; (6) the additional challenges facing the assumed virtues of international trade; (7) the likelihood of an eventual inflation revival; (8) the limits of both monetary and budgetary policies being reconsidered, as their interaction; (9) the environmental transition when the more difficult “end of the month” does interplay with the need to prevent the “end of the world”; and (10) crises as tailwind or headwind for European integration.