Strategies for responding to pandemic risk : removal and/or redistribution

The pandemic has an ongoing financial impact on the global economy, resulting in its uninsurability and ultimately an insurance protection gap. While solutions exist to address other protection gaps caused by large-scale disasters such as repeated flooding, earthquakes, and terrorism, pandemics differ and require novel solutions. This paper builds on Jarzabkowski et al.’s (2018) strategic response framework to large-scale, catastrophic disasters and applies it to the pandemic insurance protection gap. Set in the U.K. context, the research empirically studies various insurance solutions that are being proposed for pandemic risk and presents and evaluates four types of responses.