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. 2021 Apr;30(4):840-857.
doi: 10.1002/hec.4218. Epub 2021 Feb 8.

Epidemics and trust: The case of the Spanish Flu

Arnstein Aassve  1 , Guido Alfani  1   2 , Francesco Gandolfi  1 , Marco Le Moglie  3
Affiliations

Epidemics and trust: The case of the Spanish Flu

Arnstein Aassve et al. Health Econ. 2021 Apr.

Abstract

Recent studies argue that major crises can have long-lasting effects on individual behavior. While most studies focused on natural disasters, we explore the consequences of the global pandemic caused by a lethal influenza virus in 1918-19: the so-called "Spanish Flu." This was by far the worst pandemic of modern history, causing up to 100 million deaths worldwide. Using information about attitudes of respondents to the General Social Survey, we find evidence that experiencing the pandemic likely had permanent consequences in terms of individuals' social trust. Our findings suggest that lower social trust was passed on to the descendants of the survivors of the Spanish Flu who migrated to the United States. As trust is a crucial factor for long-term economic development, our research offers a new angle from which to assess current health threats.

Keywords: Spanish flu; epidemic; generalized trust; mortality crisis; pandemic.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Spanish Flu mortality by participation to World War I. The figure shows the influenza mortality rates for the sample countries employed in the analysis, divided by their participation in World War I. Horizontal lines represent the mean death rate for each group while the dashed horizontal lines show the 95% confidence intervals
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Age‐Specific excess mortality rates. The figure shows the median excess mortality rates by sex and age group, based on data for 13 countries, namely Australia, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States America (Source: Murray, Lopez, Chin, Feehan, & Hill, 2006)
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
The Effect of Spanish Flu on inherited trust: Event study. The figure shows the point estimates and the confidence intervals at 90% (i.e., least‐wide spikes), at 95% (i.e., medium‐wide spikes) and at 99% (i.e., widest spikes) for the coefficients β 3 and β 4 showed in Equation (3). The dependent variable is generalized trust. Among the time‐varying controls included in the regression there are: GDP per capita (PPP), population density, primary school enrollment (%), Polity‐IV index, the change in migration flows to the United States, countries of origins fixed effect and the interaction between the dummy Post 1918 and the dummy Neutral, which is equal to 1 if the country of origins remained neutral during WWI and 0 otherwise. Standard errors are robust to heteroschedasticity
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References

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