COVID-19's economic and social effects (A comparative study)

COVID-19 became the greatest crisis since WW2, leaving in its wake millions of dead and shaking the world economy. As this crisis had imposed great challenges upon world government, this work comes to address some of the major socio-economic problems that accompanied the COVID-19 crisis, the first problem is both a socio-economic and a moral one, represented in the issue of lockdowns and the tradeoff between human lives and economic activity (Lives VS livelihood), the second problem is of pure economic nature. On one hand, lockdowns and social restrictions stopped the wheel of the economy, diminishing the revenues of governments. On the other, the nature of the epidemic compelled the governments to increase their spending on healthcare and social protection, leaving governments scrambling for fiscal and monetary solutions to finance the fiscal needs. In this work we seek to address these problems from the perspective of traditional and Islamic economics, this will be done by representing the traditional approach through benefitting from the existing literature covering the social and economic problems that are the subject of this work. We shall then procced to explain, using Islamic principles and history, how Islam agrees or disagrees with these traditional approaches toward the problem of lockdown and fiscal deficits. In the case of a clash between traditional approaches and Islamic principles we proceeded to recommended some alternative approaches based on Islamic principles and the history of Islamic fiscal policies