Book review: The economic and legal impact of COVID-19. The case of Poland

It should be noted that the high value of the book under review may be indirectly demonstrated by the very fact of its publication in such a prestigious publishing house as Routledge. This publishing house is one of the most respected publishers of economic texts in the world. In addition, it is worth noting that in the last few years, there has been a tendency for Routledge to open up more to issues and authors from Central and Eastern Europe. Therefore, in a sense, Polish authors are the beneficiaries of this opening, and their texts are relatively more often published by top-shelf publishers.

The great and undeniable advantage of the book is its timeliness and the pace at which it was written. At the time of writing this review, that is, in September 2021, a year and a half has passed since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland. It should be emphasized that in such a short period of time a mature, well-thought-out, interdisciplinary work was created, dealing with several important aspects of the plague and at the same time constituting a kind of “Polish voice” in the international discussions addressing the issues of getting to know, investigating, and interpreting the various consequences of the “black swan,” which is the SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus.

Therefore, it was very good that a group of academics from the Warsaw School of Economics started researching the signalled issues and an important study was created, which is significant not only for what has already happened, but may also be useful in the future, even in the near future, as the pandemic is still ongoing, and predictions are made of the so-called fourth wave.

The discussion on the COVID-19 pandemic in the scientific literature as well as in journalism should be interdisciplinary, as the plague is a multidimensional phenomenon in itself. In the reviewed book, attention was focused on two aspects – economic and legal. From this point of view, the study is a “bull's-eye.” It provides a broader research perspective in the approach to pandemic issues, and this broader horizon is very much needed when we want to deeply reflect on the interpenetration of the two mentioned aspects of the plague: economic and legal ones. Moreover, the considerations in the book may turn out to be useful for conducting comparative analyses in an international cross-section and may be useful in discussing the shaping of future solutions in periods of possible subsequent pandemics and in building post-pandemic reality/normality. Thus, the breadth and importance of the issues raised as well as a relatively broad research perspective constitute the second important advantage of the discussed work.

The third strength of the study is “The economic and legal impact of COVID-19. The case of Poland” is a well-thought-out, clear concept, well connected with the goals of the conducted research procedure. This is certainly due to Jerzy Menkes and Magdalena Suska, who have addressed the challenge of scientific editing of the study.

As emphasized above, the book's advantage is its interdisciplinary dimension. The editors emphasize this circumstance in the introduction to the work, noting that the authors' reflections include the legal, economic, and social aspects of the pandemic. However, what is an asset of the study for the reader, may pose some difficulty for the reviewer in assessing the work. It manifests itself even when assessing the declared goals of the study. These goals are as follows (p. 3):

Objective 1 – to examine the compliance of actions taken by Poland in the face of COVID-19 with the objectives and principles of international organizations of which it is a member and to draw conclusions from these experiences with a view to prevent possible future similar disasters.

For an economist, a certain difficulty is a professional reference, especially to the method of achieving the first goal. It turns out that both international and national legal regulations relating to the broadly understood issue of pandemic response are quite complicated. However, when responding generally to the declared objectives of the work, it can be stated that they have been defined in an understandable manner and the reader should feel satisfied with the convincing arguments provided, which justify undertaking of the reported research.

The “supporting structure” reflecting the transparency and correct structure of the work is provided in the following table of contents (the original English titles of the individual components of the book are given below):