Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the need to consider multiple and often novel perspectives on contemporary policymaking in the context of technically complex, ambiguous, and large-scale crises. In this article, we focus on exploring a territory that remains relatively unchartered on a large scale, namely the relationship between economic inequalities and excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic, using a dataset of 25 European countries spanning 300 regions. Our findings reveal two pathways by which economic asymmetries and inequalities can observably influence excess mortality: labor market structures (capturing concentrations of industrial jobs) and income inequalities (capturing concentrations and asymmetries in income distribution). We leverage our findings to offer recommendations for policymakers toward a more deliberate consideration of the multidimensionality of technically complex, large-scale crises with a high degree of societal embeddedness. These findings also urge future scholarship to utilize a range of parameters and indicators for better understanding the relationship between cues and outcomes in such complex settings.

中文翻译：

---

传染性不平等：COVID-19 大流行期间的经济差距和超额死亡率

摘要 COVID-19 大流行强调了在技术复杂、模棱两可和大规模危机的背景下考虑当代政策制定的多种且通常是新颖的观点的必要性。在本文中，我们使用跨越 300 个地区的 25 个欧洲国家的数据集，专注于探索在大规模范围内相对未知的领域，即 COVID-19 大流行期间经济不平等与超额死亡率之间的关系。我们的研究结果揭示了经济不对称和不平等可以明显影响超额死亡率的两种途径：劳动力市场结构（捕捉工业工作的集中）和收入不平等（捕捉收入分配的集中和不对称）。我们利用我们的研究结果为政策制定者提供建议，以更深思熟虑地考虑技术复杂、具有高度社会嵌入性的大规模危机的多维性。这些发现还敦促未来的学术研究利用一系列参数和指标来更好地理解在如此复杂的环境中线索和结果之间的关系。