This book looks at the socioeconomic impacts in Spain of the COVID-19 pandemic and the extent to which the responses of the agents involved – governments, firms, households and citizens – served to minimize the damage.

Collective responses to COVID-19 include public and private contributions that acknowledge the need to internalize the negative externalities deriving from the spread of the disease. The term collective responses denotes the fact that they are adopted on behalf of all citizens or contemplate the societal effects of individual acts. Their adoption, furthermore, has required solving numerous complex coordination, cooperation and collaboration problems.

The study assesses the capacity of governments, firms, households and individuals to react to the pandemic, along with the importance of a series of factors that condition their success: the financial situation and coordination capacity of government authorities; the contributions of firms, productive sectors, the knowledge sector, households and citizens; the role of attitudes, values and levels of trust in institutions and among the population. It also examines how agent behavior changed over the course of a health crisis whose duration facilitated a degree of collective learning, demonstrating the resilience of Spanish society and the Spanish economy in the face of a crisis of a very different nature from any other in recent history.

The book closes with a set of proposals drawing on the lessons learned during the pandemic and geared to improving responsiveness to any comparable crisis that may arise in future.

This publication may be of interest to those responsible for policy delivery and the coordination of health emergencies or public health services, as well as researchers in the fields of behavioral economics and economic policy.