The return of Keynesianism? Exploring path dependency and ideational change in post-covid fiscal policy

The aim of this article is to explore the nature of policy change in the domain of public finance (fiscal policy) in the wake of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic as well as for a post-Covid era. It draws upon the literatures of path dependency and ideational change in public policy to consider three broad questions: (1) whether the pandemic really is a critical juncture for policy change; (2) whether the extant neoliberal austerity paradigm has faced lasting ideational displacement by Keynesianism; and (3) whether Covid-19 has really punctuated the existing fiscal policy equilibrium or rather served as a path-clearing accelerator of public finance trends that were already underway. The article then suggests three potential future trajectories: Keynesian, neoliberal, and mixed/other to consider how the path of policy change might materialize in the fiscal realm in the post-Covid era. The aim of this article is to examine the nature of policy change in the domain of public finance (fiscal policy) in the wake of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic as well as for a post-Covid era. It draws upon the public policy literatures on path dependency (Howlett, 2009; Kay, 2005; Mahoney, 2000; Pierson, 2000) and ideational change (Hall, 1993; Princen & T’hart, 2014) to explore three broad questions: (1) whether the pandemic the performance of financial markets suggested stunning economic growth, even though real activity had ground to a halt and required Keynesian stimulus interventions. The expansionary balance sheets of governments and their central banks helped fuel the dissonance between equity markets and real economic life. It also diminished the argument of mone- tarist/classical economists that the market would automatically resolve the crisis

The aim of this article is to examine the nature of policy change in the domain of public finance (fiscal policy) in the wake of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic as well as for a post-Covid era. It draws upon the public policy literatures on path dependency (Howlett, 2009;Kay, 2005;Mahoney, 2000;Pierson, 2000) and ideational change (Hall, 1993;Princen & T'hart, 2014) to explore three broad questions: (1) whether the pandemic really is a critical juncture (focusing event) for exogenously imposed and unforeseen policy change; (2) whether the dominant neoliberal austerity paradigm has faced ideational displacement by Keynesianism or whether this is a temporary and narrow policy window prone to reversion to a neoliberal fiscal policy paradigm; and (3) whether Covid-19 has really punctuated the existing fiscal policy equilibrium or rather served as a path-clearing accelerator of public finance trends (such as social protections) that were already underway. The claims and counterclaims regarding these points are presented as a summary in Table 1.
For the purposes of definition, the terms "Keynesian," "neoliberal," "austerity," and "real economy" are considered in this article as follows. A Keynesian approach to economics "recognizes the crucial role of aggregate demand" and "advocates fiscal stimulus in a recession despite the temporary increase in debt that it generates" (Seidman, 2012, p. 78; see also Keynes, 1936;Hiç, 2020). As such, in "a

Frame
Claim Counterclaim Critical Juncture Covid-19 was a focusing event/critical juncture that forced open a policy window in which governments could undertake large-scale fiscal stimulus programs that were previously not feasible or heavily contested (Ladi & Tsarouhas, 2020;Béland et al., 2020) Covid-19 was not a critical juncture because countries that have spent on large stimulus packages during Covid-19 can (and perhaps will) revert back to budget discipline later on, and it is therefore not a "fork in the road" since those fiscal processes can be reversed (Sebastião, 2021;Heald & Hodges, 2020) Ideational Change Covid-19 helped to challenge the prevailing paradigm of neoliberal austerity and displaced it with stimulus policy programs backed by a Keynesian paradigm. They were successful because the damage to the real economy discredited austerity ideation and opened the door to a different public finance paradigm (Ferragina & Zola, 2020;Upadhaya et al., 2020) Covid-19 has not supplanted the neoliberal paradigm because the merits of budget discipline and fiscally responsible government persist. Damage to the real economy notwithstanding, countries cannot spend their way into oblivion, and once the fallout from Covid-19 shows true signs of abating, governments may well reign in their spending binges, tighten their belts, and normalize their balance sheets (Hanniman, 2020;Chohan, 2020c) Punctuated Equilibrium/Path Clearing Covid-19's crisis punctuated the prevalent orientation of economic crisis management because of its damage to the real economy, which led to a new economic equilibrium in which Keynesian stimulus programs were forcibly enacted to protect lives and livelihoods, thus displacing the longstanding austerity-response equilibrium with an expansionary fiscal (and Keynesian) equilibrium (Grossi et al., 2020;Razavi et al., 2020) Covid-19 has only accelerated trends that were already underway, and so it is a path-clearing accelerator rather than a true disruptor. For example, social protections are not new ideas per se, and there was emergent political will for these ideas that merely required a powerful exogenous force to clear the path ahead and accelerate their uptake. Covid-19 has done so and thus accelerated larger processes that were gaining ground in any case (Dimian et al., 2021;Bertin et al., 2021) Source: Author's Research.
severe recession, stimulating aggregate demand is more important than preventing a rise in government debt" (Seidman, 2012, p. 82). 1 Meanwhile, neoliberalism is a philosophy and "political rationality" which reframes society within a marketizing logic (Brown, 2003), and the particular focus in this article is on neoliberalism's approach toward economic crises through the imposition of austerity policies (Blyth, 2013;Crouch, 2011), which means "no fiscal stimulus, no financial rescues, and immediate cuts in government spending" (Seidman, 2012, p. 77). Austerity policies, as per McBride and Evans (2017, p. 8) refer to: fiscal/budgetary consolidation; structural reforms (see Chohan, 2019); and cuts to social programs (see also Moosa & Moosa, 2019a, 2019b. The "real economy" in this article refers to activity within the economy as a whole (Berger & Roman, 2018;Laopodis & Sawhney, 2002) rather than solely in the "financialized economy" in the bank and non-bank financial sectors. This distinction is sometimes framed as "Main Street" vs. "Wall Street" (see Neiburg & Guyer, 2017), and it is important insofar as it helps distinguish between crises in financial markets and those affecting the economy at large. 2 The article proceeds from these definitions toward studying policy change in the domain of public finance during and beyond the Covid-19 pandemic. 1 The differences between old Keynesians, post-Keynesians, and neo-Keynesians (Cogan et al., 2010), especially regarding their views on long-run equilibria (flexible prices vs. endogenized investment; see Azad, 2018) are beyond the scope of this article. 2 The Global Financial Crisis of 2008, for example, was a largely sector-specific event and was confined to toxic securities in the financial markets (Blinder and Zandi, 2010), and it therefore required stimulus that focused on recapitalizing the financial sector. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 engendered a crisis across the entirety of national economies (i.e., not only in the financial sector) and thus required stimulus that was targeted toward multiple economic domains.
To begin, the discipline of public policy has a longstanding interest in the mechanics and dynamics of policy change in societies (see review in Capano, 2012), especially in terms of how policies might remain stable or maintain a steady state for extended periods of time (Capano & Howlett, 2009) but then shift abruptly in a different or even opposing direction (Howlett, 2009;Pierson, 2000). This "never-ending puzzle" (Capano, 2012) of a vacillation and contrast between "routine and extraordinary dynamics" (Baumgartner & Jones, 2002) has been addressed in the public policy literature through two discourses: (1) path dependency theory and (2) ideational change and paradigm shifts (Hall, 1993;Baumgartner, 2013). Both rely on the phenomenon of punctuated equilibria (Jones & Baumgartner, 2005) and posit that policies tend to proceed along paths with a degree of stability in their direction and momentum. This steady-state continuity helps policies entrench themselves over time unless certain exogenous "shocks" or cumulative negative-feedback events veer them toward a new direction (Howlett, 2009;Mahoney, 2000).
Policies proceed along certain directions because of feedback mechanisms, which reward the entrenchment of those policies and thus encourage their continuity (Pierson & Skocpol, 2002). Policy monopolies may also take shape which dampens the capacity to redirect policies onto new paths (Jones & Baumgartner, 2005). The literature also gives considerable weight to exogenous shocks that may either reinforce the status quo through "positive" feedback or revert/subvert the status quo (Skogstad, 2017) through "negative" feedback (Williams, 2009). In the context of this paper, one account is that Covid-19 was a shock with negative feedback that has undermined the prevalent neoliberal austerity status quo in public finance (Ferragina & Zola, 2020;Upadhaya et al., 2020), thus initiating large-scale government stimulus spending around the world (Razavi et al., 2020;Grossi et al., 2020; see also Table 1). Another account, however, is that Covid-19 has been a path-clearing accelerator of changes that were already underway (Bertin et al., 2021;Dimian et al., 2021), such as stimulus through income protection measures, employment protection programs, and Universal Basic Income ("UBI," see Bertin et al., 2021;Bichia, 2017;Chohan, 2017Chohan, , 2021b. In policy studies that use path dependency approaches, the emphasis is on understanding which actions in the past help to set the current policy trajectory and how these trajectories are disturbed (or fail to be disturbed) by exogenous shocks and by the agency of key opportunistic actors and institutions (Blyth, 2002;Mahoney & Thelen, 2010). Equally, these approaches seek to examine the normative and belief-based precepts of public policy entrenchment and disruption, along with the tools that public managers use to grapple with stability and change (Hogan & Howlett, 2015;Howlett & Tosun, 2019). For example, neoliberalism's entrenchment during the periods of Reaganism and Thatcherism set a fiscal policy trajectory which would only be intermittently and transitorily challenged by negative feedback during economic crises, such as the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 (Blinder & Zandi, 2010;Blyth, 2013). But these crises did not do away decisively with austerity-based fiscal orientations (McBride & Evans, 2017;Salas-Porras, 2018), and this article discusses whether the exogenous shock of Covid-19 constitutes a sufficiently strong force to really disrupt that path.
There are various critiques of the use of path dependency in public policy (see Deeg, 2001;Kay, 2005), and Capano and Howlett have observed that "policy change is a very ambiguous area of academic study, and one full of pitfalls" (2009, p. 7). Nevertheless, it provides a useful approach with which to examine how Covid-19 has impacted fiscal policy paradigms through the "crisisification" of extant neoliberal budgetary attitudes that were disrupted by Covid-19 (see crisisification in Boin et al., 2018;Rhinard, 2019). The crisisification approach has advanced public policy literature in recent years because "most attention [had previously] focused upon homeostatic models, in which exogenouslydriven shocks undermine institutionally entrenched policy equilibria" (2009, p. 241). Policy discontinuity was generally attributed to economic crises (Jones, 2001), which are relevant to this article, but an important distinction will be made in this article between "financial crises" (i.e., relegated largely to the financial markets, such as the 2008 GFC) and "real economy" crises (such as  which are much more shattering in their impact on lives and livelihoods (see also Table 2).
In addition to path dependency theory, there are useful insights from the literature on ideational change (Hall, 1993;Princen & T'hart, 2014) and its focus on paradigm shifts that can also contribute to discussions of post-Covid Keynesianism. Ideational change argues that policy changes are likelier if they are backed by paradigms, and as Princen and T'hart remark, "the presence or absence of policy paradigms can […] predict the pattern of policy change that a policy sector is likely to display" (Princen & T'hart, 2014, p. 472). This is true for the neoliberal austerity paradigm and its variants (Blyth, 2013; Table 2. "Real Economy" factors behind Covid-19's severity as critical juncture.

Factor Explanation
Excess mortality The lethal potential of Covid-19 led to vast scales of excess deaths around the world, with particularly severe tolls in some regions (the USA, India, EU, and South America). There is a concomitant actuarial loss from so great an excess mortality and years of lives lost Severity of lockdowns Billions of people were in some form of confinement in 2020, and this exacted a physical and mental toll, loss of productivity, damage to social relations, and loss of income and livelihood. At one point in mid-2020, half of all humanity was under some sort of lockdown order, and the International Labor Organization (ILO) warned that nearly 7% of working hours had been eliminated in the second quarter of 2020, equivalent to 195 million full-time workers (International Labor Organization [ILO], 2020) Disability-adjusted life years Even when not fatal, the wide disease expression of Covid-19 has numerous long-lasting physical effects that have still to be understood and will impact human productivity in terms of disability-adjusted life years. In the second quarter of 2020, four out of five people in the global workforce of 3.3 billion were being affected by either full or partial workplace closures (International Labor Organization [ILO], 2020) Unequal exposure to the pandemic's aftershocks Covid-19 exposed the underlying inequalities embedded within and suppressed beneath social veneers, with some groups suffering more acutely than others. Class relations were also detrimentally impacted by the inequality of lockdown effects, economic paralysis, and the differences of mobility in job requirements by worker type (Wang et al., 2020) Neoliberal propagation of social vulnerability "One reason the COVID-19 pandemic, will have, and has already had, such a serious economic impact is that countries have organized their societies in ways that render them extremely vulnerable" (McKee & Stuckler, 2020, p. 641), which is a product of neoliberal public administration reforms that weakened state protections and provisions for the public Mismatch between financial markets and real economic performance During Covid-19, the performance of financial markets suggested stunning economic growth, even though real activity had ground to a halt and required Keynesian stimulus interventions. The expansionary balance sheets of governments and their central banks helped fuel the dissonance between equity markets and real economic life. It also diminished the argument of monetarist/classical economists that the market would automatically resolve the crisis Sources: author research; (Baker et al., 2020;Chohan, 2020bChohan, , 2020cChohan, , 2021aChohan, , 2021b Ferragina & Zola, 2020; Giroux, 2017;Khoury, 2015), as well as for the Keynesian paradigm and its variants (Hiç, 2020;Cogan et al., 2010;Seidman, 2012). Both paradigms possess strong connections to fiscal policy praxis, and Keynesianism's strong paradigmatic backing helped it to resurface in the expansionary fiscal responses of governments during the pandemic. Furthermore, ideational change argues that paradigm changes occur "as a rational reaction in response to external stimuli in the form of a destabilizing shock" (Flockhart, 2005, p. 262), which echoes path dependency theory's logic of Covid-19 acting as a significant exogenous disruptor and of the rational response of large-scale stimulus that was followed by governments around the world Ladi & Tsarouhas, 2020). As mentioned earlier, both path dependence and ideational change draw upon the notion of punctuated equilibria, which occur at critical junctures/focusing events (Kay, 2005;Mahoney, 2000). Focusing event and critical juncture are, for the purposes of this article, used somewhat interchangeably, but the more precise term here is focusing event (Kingdon, 1984), which refers to an unforeseen occurrence or event that offers a window for the implementation of new policies. Birkland notes that "focusing events serve as important opportunities for politically disadvantaged groups to champion messages that had been effectively suppressed by dominant groups and advocacy coalitions" (1998, p. 54). Keynesian economic approaches came to the fore when Covid-19 acted as a focusing event because, as this article shall argue, the pandemic opened the window to new policy approaches that required the active deployment of multifaceted fiscal stimulus packages (see also discussions in Heald & Hodges, 2020;Ladi & Tsarouhas, 2020;Sebastião, 2021).
As with many other disciplines, there has been a flurry of research in the public policy field since the onset of Covid-19. However, much of the useful emergent literature pertains to analyses of the responses that countries undertook, particularly during the early phase of the pandemic, often to policy effectiveness in governmental responses. This is done especially with regard to the absolute and relative intensities of the crises that various societies faced (Lee et al., 2020;Woo, 2020), the legitimacy that public managers enjoyed or lacked (Hartley & Jarvis, 2020), and the degree of policy customization and mix that they employed (Mei, 2020;Migone, 2020;Rocco et al., 2020). In large part, however, such works have left the questions of path dependencies, critical junctures, punctuated equilibria, and pathclearing accelerators somewhat unattended. As such, this article, along with others in this special issue, help to address gaps in the literature regarding path dependent phenomena and their impacts on public policy in the post-Covid state, both in the overarching sense and also in sector-specific contexts.
The remainder of the article is structured as follows. First, in drawing upon foregoing discussion, the article discusses the policy stability of the longstanding neoliberal austerity paradigm, which was punctuated by the exogenous shock of Covid-19. Previous junctures (economic crises such as the 2008 GFC) emitted negative feedback but left the neoliberal austerity paradigm largely intact. They failed to create ideational change in the way that Covid-19 has, this article argues, because the pandemic has had a much greater impact on the "real economy" rather than just financial markets (as in 2008). Therefore, second, the article makes the distinction between "financial crises" (i.e., relegated largely to financial securities, such as the 2008 GFC) and "real economy crises" (such as Covid-19) as critical to punctuating the fiscal policy path of many countries, while also identifying several trends for which the pandemic served as a path-clearing accelerator. Both the punctuation and acceleration caused by Covid-19 are equally important considerations. Third, the article charts out three pathways for the future: a Keynesian, a neoliberal, and a mixed/other path and discusses the merits of each as they may apply to fiscal policy in different societies. The article then offers concluding remarks.

The Covid-19 crisis: from neoliberalism to resurgent Keynesianism?
Heclo once presciently remarked that "nowhere is the importance of [social] learning and alteration of perspective more clearly demonstrated than in the economic doctrines prevalent in any given period" (1974, p. 312), and in many parts of the world, the economic doctrine that prevailed over the past three decades was one of neoliberal austerity (Blyth, 2013;Stuckler & Basu, 2013;Schui, 2014). Various economic crises including the Greek Sovereign Debt Crisis (Varoufakis, 2016), the Asian Financial Crisis (Zimmerman & Stone, 2018), and several Latin American crises (see Brazil in Blyth, 2013;Ladi et al., 2018) demonstrated how financial authorities and institutions responded to economic catastrophes with austerity policies. Oftentimes, such austerity initiatives came with an immense human cost (Stuckler & Basu, 2013;Moosa & Moosa, 2019b) and were thus frequently criticized as "great failures" of economic policy (Schui, 2014). Nevertheless, the negative policy feedback from such crises was insufficient to alter the neoliberal orthodoxy or unsettle its path rigidity.
The 2008 GFC was thought to be a critical juncture in that it caused an "epistemic crisis" in the realm of both fiscal and monetary policy (Gonzalez-Hernando et al., 2018, p. 125). Salas-Porras describes the 2008 GFC as an opportunity for "Keynesian insurgents" to regain ideational space in the USA, but recognized that "while Keynesianism was moving towards the 'mainstream' again, it did so not unopposed" (2018, p. 244), as neoliberal ideologues fought tooth-and-nail to preserve their policy command over American public finance. Indeed, the 2008 GFC ultimately neither punctuated the dominance nor shifted the paradigm of neoliberal austerity. Neoliberalism instead suffered a "strange non-death" (Crouch, 2011) after 2008, and its advocates continued to persist in propagating "a set of causal beliefs, for example, about the origins of the financial crisis," thus contesting the causality and the narrative of policy change (Westermeier, 2018, p. 177). Plehwe et al. noted that the neoliberal "school of economic thought remained hegemonic, despite sustained contestation" (2018, p. 189). Salas-Porras remarks that "even if the Keynesian revival did not last long in the US, no consensus had been reached in the policy community around austerity programs and the struggle to define a new policy discourse continued" (2018, p. 244).
An important element of what lingered about austerity thinking after the GFC was a continued worry about the public finances of nations such as the USA (Chohan, 2018;Rivlin & Sawhill, 2004). In many OECD countries, there were longstanding fiscal challenges and deficit-financing tendencies, which were only partially reduced by budget-discipline rhetoric and policy (Chohan, 2019). Austerity remained a tightly embraced belief for many governments, even though "its foundational ideas did not add up," and there were "neither theoretical debates nor empirical evidence [that could] lead to a paradigm shift" (Plehwe et al., 2018, p. 193; see also Blanchard & Leigh, 2013). Covid-19 has, however, brought with it a much more forceful occasion (focusing event) for Keynesianism to reassert itself in policy praxis and ideational preeminence than the 2008 GFC did. However, Covid-19's Keynesianism is by no means a replica of Keynesian programs in the past, such as those of the Great Depression or the post-WW2 phase (see Keynes, 1936;Seidman, 2012). Contemporary Keynesianism has relied on newer instruments such as moratoria on evictions (and rental payments) and income protection, as well as on different mechanisms such as the use of corporations as channels of stimulus funding (Grossi et al., 2020;Rocco et al., 2020;Whoriskey et al., 2020).
As Ferragina and Zola find, even dye-in-the-wool neoliberal regimes saw their public opinion shift decisively in favor of Keynesian (or rather: anti-austerity) approaches once the pandemic hit (2020). In fact, even stalwart partisans of neoliberal austerity did not directly question the need for a Keynesian response once the pandemic arrived. Instead, they began to quibble about the details of policies, rather than challenge those policies outright (Ferragina & Zola, 2020), which speaks to the lens of ideational change and perhaps a discredited neoliberal paradigm. For example, the right-wing Heritage Foundation complained about how the unemployment insurance component in the American CARES Act could disincentivize workers (Boccia et al., 2020), but they did not dispute the fundamental basis for a Keynesian stimulus.
Arguing from the "crisification" standpoint (Boin et al., 2018) and the crisis-reform linkage (Boin & Otten, 1996), what makes Covid-19 different is the unfreezing of "collective stress" (see Barton, 1969;T'hart, 1993), due to damage to the "real economy." Unlike the 2008 GFC, which was centered on financial markets and toxic securities (Blinder & Zandi, 2010), Covid-19 was a crisis that physically impacted human lives through sickness and death, and also through remedial strategies such as confinement and lockdown. Table 2 lists some of the key "real economy" factors that converted Covid-19 into a more effective and significant negative-feedback critical juncture for Keynesian policies than previous crises.
The shock to the "real economy" was severe by many measures (Baker et al., 2020;Chohan, 2020bChohan, , 2020c, and a large-scale Keynesian intervention became a political eventuality because of various significant socioeconomic factors, including the severity of lockdowns, excess mortality and disability-adjusted life years, unequal exposure to the pandemic's aftershocks, neoliberal propagation of social vulnerability, a disconnect between financial markets and actual economic performance, and unprecedented unemployment. It was the cumulative weight of such factors which made a robust fiscal response into a necessity for virtually all governments. Things had come to the point that even the most neoliberally oriented governments would be loath not to engage in Keynesian responses to such an unprecedented focusing event. Millions of lives have already been lost and billions have been in some form of confinement or quarantine; countless hours of disability-adjusted live years have been struck off; and the impact of this has not been evenly shared within or among societies. Beyond this, as McKee and Stuckler note, "one reason the COVID-19 pandemic, will have, and has already had, such a serious economic impact is that countries have organized their societies [under neoliberalism] in ways that render them extremely vulnerable" (2020, p. 641). Such embedded vulnerability meant that many societies faced a more drastic shock than if they had forged greater resilience in their public administrative institutions (Upadhaya et al., 2020). Meanwhile, expansionary balance sheets of governments helped fuel the dissonance between the performance of financial markets, which suggested stunning economic growth and real economic activity, which had ground to a halt and required Keynesian stimulus interventions. The enormous discrepancy between stellar stock markets and struggling households discredited the usual argument of monetarist/classical economists that the market would automatically resolve the crisis, and this put the neoliberal paradigm into considerable (but perhaps temporary) disrepute.
At the same time, it can be argued that Covid-19 was not entirely a focusing event or harbinger for new fiscal policy paradigms, as much as it was a path-clearing accelerator of latent policy shifts already underway. These included policies which had been receiving micro-level positive feedback over time (e.g., in pilot projects), but which had not gained outright adoption at the macro-scale. Prominent among these fiscal stimulus categories were social protection programs, such as Basic Income provisions (Bertin et al., 2021;Bichia, 2017;Chohan, 2017Chohan, , 2021b, income protection programs (Rocco et al., 2020;Wang et al., 2020;Woo, 2020), and employment protection programs (Dimian et al., 2021;Migone, 2020). Such programs received an accelerated policy legitimization due to their suitability as response measures in the economic crisis. Indeed, the account of Covid-19 as a path-clearing accelerator is not simply premised on trends that were evolving, such as Universal Basic Income or other social protections, but also on how latent and simmering social problems bubbled up with acute intensity. These problems included social vulnerabilities (Chohan, 2020c;Perri et al., 2020), racial disharmony (Abedi et al., 2021;Chohan, 2021a), excessive manifestations of nationalism (e.g., in vaccine nationalism, see Chohan, 2021b;Katz et al., 2021), and economic inequality (Clouston et al., 2021). Structural inequalities within societies became more apparent during the Covid-19 crisis, not just in unemployment, but also in access to healthcare, social protections, and other areas of public value creation (Ashford et al., 2020;Chohan, 2020b;International Labor Organization [ILO], 2020). These factors also weighed upon the decisions of governments to engage in largescale stimulus decisions in an accelerated, almost knee-jerk, manner during the early phase of the pandemic.
But just how big was the Keynesian response of governments in the early phase? Table 3 sets out the absolute and relative (to GDP) size of the initial responses of many major governments, which were frequently bolstered by additional waves of stimulus spending.
As Table 3 indicates, the stimulus programs set off in response to the exogenous shock of Covid-19 were substantial, and the pandemic served as a focusing event that opened a unique policy window for government intervention (both fiscal and monetary) of a magnitude unseen in living memory for most countries. For government balance sheets, the pandemic punctuated a new equilibrium, such that in countries such as the USA and Australia, the early-phase stimulus amounted to nearly 12% of the entire national economic output. Yet the range of interventions diverged meaningfully between countries, both in absolute and relative terms. For many developed countries, the scope of stimulus was in the 12-figure range (exceeding $100 billion). For some developing countries, a comparatively small stimulus outlay was managed in a targeted way to maximize pro-poor policies (Chohan, 2020b), and the pandemic therefore served as a path-clearing accelerator for policies intended to construct the rudiments of a social protection system (see Chohan, forthcoming). For other countries, such as Brazil, even a comparatively large fiscal package in absolute and relative terms could not translate into an effective policy response due to a series of larger public value problems (Pfrimer & Barbosa, 2020).

The post-covid Keynesian tilt: pathways for the future
In considering the foregoing analysis, the main questions that linger are those of permanence: is there a lasting paradigm shift in public finance due to Covid-19? Or is the pandemic just a Keynesian "moment" that will fade once Covid-19 dissipates, thus reverting the path dependency to its original equilibrium? Furthermore, will Keynesian sensibilities only be aroused when it is the "real economy" that is distressed or will financial and sectoral crises also be met with countercyclical measures? This section discusses path dependency possibilities in public finance for the post-Covid future, echoing another effort by T'hart and Boin of listing four pathways for grappling with transboundary crises as a whole (T'Hart & Boin, 2022) and their earlier work on crisis meaning-making (Boin et al., 2008). There are three broad path trajectories that might be envisaged for the future: a Keynesian; a neoliberal; and a mixed/other one. The claims and justifications for each are presented in Table 4.
As can be gleaned from Table 4, the emergence of a truly Keynesian fiscal policy paradigm would reflect both Covid-19's path-clearing accelerator role as well as a new punctuated equilibrium. The public discourse in countries around fiscal spending, debt, and deficit financing would shift away from austerity and toward aggregate demand management, both in the upswings and downswings of the economic cycle. This would stand in marked contradistinction to eras such as the 1990s and the ensuing years that were characterized by a "debt-clock" attitude, with a "ticking time-bomb" concern about debt levels (Rivlin & Sawhill, 2004). Public support for stimulus programs, especially involving social protections, would be strong and their implementation would occur in an accelerated manner. Once implemented, the structures created by stimulus spending (especially social protections) would be difficult for opponents to repeal or undo.
On this point, there is some hindsight with which to look at the trajectory of fiscal profiles since the early phase of the pandemic (March-October, 2020). Since that time, the USA has perhaps provided what might be the best example of a possibly enduring Keynesian tilt, since the Biden administration has proposed something well beyond pandemic-related stimulus in the form of the administration's Build Back Better (BBB) plan. The BBB plan has three major long-term components: the American Rescue Plan Act, the American Jobs Plan, and the American Families Plan, which together amount to $7 trillion dollars in proposed funding over a multi-decade horizon (White House, 2021aHouse, , 2021b. The BBB plan's focus is on truly Keynesian objects of interest: infrastructure, employment, technology, (renewable) energy, affordable housing, wages, industry, and transport. It also delves into important elements of social protection such as childcare, women's employment, several years of free public education, pedagogic improvements (teacher quality), and tax concessions to lower-income families (White House, 2021a).
The premise of such spending is that "it is not enough to restore where we were prior to the pandemic -we need to build a stronger economy that does not leave anyone behind" (White House, 2021b, p. 1). In short, the BBB goes beyond the standard of restoring pre-pandemic economic activity and focuses on longer-term "investment" in society. It contends that it is "investment in America that will create millions of good jobs, rebuild our country's infrastructure, and position the United States to out-compete China" (White House, 2021a, emphasis added). If such long-term stimulus measures are all passed into law and implemented rigorously in the USA, then perhaps the focusing event of Covid-19 would translate into a paradigm shift that would far outlive the pandemic itself, much as Keynes' original writings (1936) outlived him.
That said, there is also a reasonable indication that there might be a reversion to the neoliberal austerity paradigm once the dust of Covid-19 settles. International institutions, opposition parties, and neoliberal governments can over time reintroduce austerity or budget-balancing measures (as previous local crises have shown). This echoes a degree of consensus in the literature that "learning" from a crisis is difficult and rarer than one might think (see Stern, 1997). Many studies in fact show that significant crises do not lead to long-term path alterations or to punctuations in resting equilibria (see Castles, 2010;Starke et al., 2013). Quite a few studies in fact find that there is a strong a threat-rigidity element that resists substantive change, which is why the probability of new policy paradigms emerging in post-crisis contexts is ultimately rather low (see examples in Armingeon, 2012;Starke et al., 2013).
One must pose two difficult questions to the advocates of Keynesianism in the longer-run post-Covid context. First, will governments manage their balance sheets downward during future boom phases of the economic cycle? Keynesianism is not simply a function of amassing debts and undertaking deficit spending during recessionary phases. Rather, it relies on targeted countercyclical approaches to managing aggregate demand during boom periods as well. If not, then Keynesianism is not as pertinent a lens to examine the new paradigm as MMT might be (see below). Second, was neoliberalism's marketizing "political rationality" (Brown, 2003) truly undermined by the critical juncture of Covid-19? Although the best-tightening element (Peck, 2012) certainly diminished under the weight of the pandemic's devastation (see Table 2), the state-market relationships that neoliberalism envisages more broadly, and the market-logic that it infuses into public managerial realms (education, healthcare, transportation, etc.), do not seem to have altered in any meaningful way. This then raises questions about the degree to which ideational change has really occurred, and it corroborates the argument that the neoliberal paradigm might persist in the longer run. There are also some mixed/other perspectives that may become more prominent in public finance. One argument is that neither Keynesianism nor neoliberal austerity will have outright dominance but that other narratives and discourses in public finance might instead gain greater traction. MMT (see Chohan, 2020a) is perhaps the best example of this third-way approach, and it has assumed increasing de facto prominence since the pandemic. Although MMT is complex and nuanced in its claims, a summary argument that arises from MMT is that there is no financial constraint on fiscal policy for a currency-sovereign country. Therefore, such a country can borrow as much money as it likes to fund its requirements and invest in society, since it is borrowing from itself and can therefore pay itself as it likes. This is true, MMT argues, up until the point of price stability and full employment. This claim of MMT derives from a notion that is shared with Keynesianism: the idea of "functional finance" (see Lerner, 1943), which is to say: "governments should set whatever fiscal positions are consistent with price stability and full employment, irrespective of debt/deficit level" (Chohan, 2020a, p. 3). It is this hybrid "functional finance" perspective shared by MMT and Keynesianism that may come to be the dominant approach toward debt and deficit discussions going forward.
However, an equally plausible mixed outcome, which draws upon the discussion of a previous section (see also Table 2), is that "real economy" crises and typical financial crises may come to receive different treatments in terms of government fiscal responses. This would constitute a dual strategy toward critical junctures: the "real" crises, given their far greater devastation to lives and livelihoods, may warrant the sort of proactive countercyclical treatment seen during Covid-19 but financial-asset crises (which are more common) may be dealt with through the neoliberal austerity paradigm. All of this will also depend on both the degree of intracrisis learning (Moynihan, 2009), in that the public debt and deficit levels will be seen in the shorter-term context of an ongoing pandemic (with further possible waves), as well as the inter-crisis learning in the longer-term considerations of keeping sustainable public finances (Witting & Moyson, 2015). Furthermore, although Covid-19 has opened a policy window, some policy windows are narrower than others (Vilpišauskas, 2009).
Additionally, one must remember that fiscal policy is an inherently political issue (Chohan, 2018(Chohan, , 2019(Chohan, , 2020c and is therefore prone to politicization once the pandemic subsides. The tenor of fiscal policy will therefore depend on the degree and extent of learning undertaken from fiscal spending during and after the crisis period (Broekema, 2016;Broekema et al., 2019), particularly since some countries will recover (and have recovered) faster than others. One may see this in differing fiscal policy trajectories, especially for countries that were comparatively unaffected by the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of lives and livelihoods. For example, countries and regions that have remained relatively resilient, including China, Taiwan/Chinese Taipei, and New Zealand, may not require much more stimulus and therefore not pursue a necessarily Keynesian approach toward targeted countercyclical spending. There may thus be a need to examine national-level and country-specific trajectories with greater granularity rather than tackling path dependencies and ideational shift in the broader sense. This is also exemplified in Table 3, where the absolute and relative size of early-phase pandemic stimulus differed markedly among countries and did not necessarily correlate well with the effectiveness of the overall Covid-19 response in terms of saving lives and livelihoods (e.g., Brazil).

Concluding remarks
Viewing public finance through the lenses of path dependency and ideational change is very useful insofar as they inform some of the fundamental claims about fiscal policy path trajectories during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. However, definitive answers seem elusive because different countries may arrive at different policy outcomes from the pandemic's focusing event. One may still ask, for example, if Covid-19 really is a punctuated equilibrium or merely a path-clearing accelerator of policies that were already underway? There are merits to both viewpoints, at least in the realm of public finance. Similarly, one may ask whether the pandemic truly displaced neoliberal austerity paradigm? On some level, it appeared evident that the critical juncture of Covid-19 punctuated the prevalent austerity equilibrium, but whether this is a lasting paradigm shift remains disputable. Finally, if Keynesianism is the philosophy that shall ascend during this pandemic-related period of policy change, what form is it to take: a true countercyclical aggregate demand version, or a hybrid functional finance form?
To a large degree, these remain open questions despite the foregoing explorations of this article. They will manifest differently in different societies, given that the "real economy" is recovering at different speeds around the world, and therefore general considerations about public finance in a global context remain mired in a "never-ending puzzle" (Capano, 2012). A problem with delivering a verdict on any of these questions is that the pandemic is still underway, in some places now entering a fourth or fifth wave. The "post-Covid era" is still not upon us, and it may not be for some time, as variants evolve and strains mutate. As such, questions of policy change in public finance will continue to loom large and remain at the forefront of public managerial attention while the paradigms and paths compete.

Funding
None declared.