Shutdown: How Covid Shook the Worldʼs Economy

Translated to Russian by Alla Belykh; ed. Andrey Belykh. – Moscow: Gaidar Institute Press, 2023. – 472 p.

ISBN 978-5-93255-641-2

In 2020, we experienced both global and smaller-scale shocks. These shocks have hit the global economy hard, disrupted international relations and affected the daily life of almost everyone. Never before has the size of the global economy shrunk by 20% in just a few weeks. In the history of modern capitalism, it has never happened that 95% of the entire world economy in a matter of months at the same time turned out to be in a deplorable state. Hundreds of millions of people around the world have lost their jobs. And all this happened against the background of a pandemic, accompanied by a huge number of deaths.

Focusing on the problems of finance and business, the author puts the history of the pandemic in a context that, presenting the situation in a completely new light, allows us to soberly assess how unprepared the world was to deal with this crisis, and to understand how deep cracks have formed in our everyday and business life.