COVID‐19 and regional economies: An introduction to the special issue

The COVID-19 pandemic, its human cost in sickness and mortality, and the resultant disruption of economic and social activity, shook the world in early 2020. As of this writing, many parts of the world are still shaking, with over 170 million cases, and almost four million deaths. The economic costs are also enormous. The disruption to economic activity, as the result of both the human toll of the pandemic, as well as changes in human behavior, some of which were mandated by government policy, has cost untold amounts in almost every corner of the globe. What is, however, obvious from the data at this point is that the pandemic is a spatial phenomenon. Consider Figure 1, taken from the contribution by Rodriguez-Pose and Burlina (2021) to this special issue, which displays regional variation in excess mortality during the early stages of the pandemic. The map makes it quite clear that there were spatial concentrations of virus incidence, and these concentrations, or hotspots, are spatially correlated. The maxim that close things are related more closely was never so clear.