Travel more or less: what's best for the pandemic?

Tino Sanandaji talks about globalization's "biological environmental limitation" which is not just about ecological sustainability.

- We already know that we cannot have as much globalization, regardless of the economic benefits, as it damages the environment. And if the world becomes too globalized, the risk of spreading extremely dangerous epidemics also increases. One would have some friction, like a "Tobin tax" (economist James Tobin's proposal to tax international currency transactions to reduce currency speculation). Sometimes it is good to throw some gravel in the machinery.

A global tax on flying to reduce human travel?

- There may be preparations for quickly establishing quarantines. It is also conceivable to have some kind of tax, if one is to internalize the cost of flying where one cost is the spread of viruses. Globalization's main advantage is that ideas are disseminated, not that we travel physically.

On the contrary, Johan Norberg thinks that we should move more to reduce the risk of serious infection.

- It's totally the wrong way to go. Of course, the more we move, the more we spread the infection. But, on the other hand, it also means that we more often spread microbes and create resilience at an early stage.

So is it good that people are spread across the world?

- Yes, take the swine flu as an example, which was the hardest hit then? Well, 24 of the 30 hardest hit countries were island nations, precisely because they had no natural immunity. They had not received the earlier, more harmless variants.

So New Zealand is doing wrong now that isolates itself against Coronan?

- New Zealand can of course temporarily get rid of this by closing its borders. But what will they do then? If they can do this, they will have to cut themselves from the outside world for an incredibly long time to come. It will probably hit the economy and society much worse than the virus itself had done.

See them discuss the pros and cons of globalization together with Sweco's CEO Åsa Bergman at the Economy Agency.