Edinburgh Napier University

  The 2021 World Economic Forum pledged a ‘Great Reset’, recognising that the Covid-19 crisis would be compounded by several other crises, actual and threatened, including the climate crisis, financial crises, social and economic inequality, and the threat of further pandemics.1

This is the second Special Issue of the International Review of Applied Economics focussing on the Covid-19 pandemic. The first, on ‘The Political Economy of Covid-19ʹ (Volume 35, Number 2, March 2021) included an article by John Child, which argued that while the pandemic intensified many of the economic and social problems that societies were already facing, the public response to the crisis points to a constructive way forward, widening participation in organisational decision-making as an approach to addressing the problems, which will continue to be with us – in effect, to enable a ‘Great Reset’ to be actually put into practice on the ground, and realised.2

The articles in this follow-up Special Issue also relate to the connections made by the World Economic Forum to the other serious challenges facing humanity, and in particular inequality – which in turn can exacerbate the risk of financial crises, and the threat of climate crisis.