Covid-19 confronts humanity with a host of testing moral decisions. When hospital capacity is limited, which patients should get access to life-saving equipment? For how long should virus-limiting restrictions on public activity remain in place, given the immense cost of such measures? To this list, some add another: how generous should public assistance to struggling households and firms be, when such aid could encourage the abuse of state-provided safety-nets? Worries like these, concerning what social scientists call moral hazard, have been relatively muted during the pandemic, and appropriately so. But hard questions about risk and responsibility cannot be put off…

As the world’s most powerful central banks meet this week, one thing is apparent: They’re in survival mode. Little else matters for economic policy beyond weathering the coronavirus pandemic. The risk is that policy makers commit to a range of measures without an exit strategy. This is nowhere more apparent than Japan. On Monday, the central bank introduced a number of crisis-busting policies: abandoning limits on purchases of government bonds, doubling the target for buying corporate debt and commercial paper, and easing the commitment to 2% inflation. The latter puts to rest the career-defining goal of Bank of Japan Governor…

The decay in the Nigerian health care sector had been festering for decades. The cause of the rot has always been a multi-headed hydra that has refused to be slain. Some have said that it is just a reflection of the larger society with poor planning, corruption, incompetence, nepotism and an inefficient system that has clogged the wheels of progress. No progressive nation takes its healthcare system for granted. All nations need a healthy citizenry to ensure that productivity is maximized and the future generations are guaranteed a solid future. The most populous black Nation had not always been in…

Editorial Famine is riding alongside pestilence, on the tail of war. Though coronavirus leaves no part of the world untouched, its impact will be harshest in places that were already suffering. Yet the problems it brings with it may prove more deadly than Covid-19 itself. Even in the richest countries, coronavirus has left families in hunger; for the poorest, it could mean starvation. The head of the World Food Programme warns that we are now on the brink of a hunger pandemic, with the prospect of multiple famines “of biblical proportions” within a few months, across three dozen countries. Households…