Panel: Economic Policy and Governance during Pandemics using AI

Abstract: The global food supply chain (starting at farms and ending with consumers) has been seriously disrupted by many outlier events such as trade wars, the China demand shock, natural disasters, and pandemics. Outlier events create uncertainty along the entire supply chain in addition to intervening policy responses to mitigate their adverse effects. AI methods (i.e. machine/reinforcement/deep learning) provide an opportunity to better understand outcomes during outlier events by identifying regular, irregular and contextual components. Employing AI can provide guidance to decision making suppliers, farmers, processors, wholesalers, and retailers along the supply chain, and policy makers to facilitate welfare-improving outcomes. This panel discusses these issues.