Next steps for a people’s vaccine

‘The Biden administration’s decision to stop opposing a proposed COVID-19 waiver of certain intellectual-property rights under World Trade Organization rules is a welcome move. But ending the pandemic also requires scaling up knowledge and technology transfer, as well as public production of vaccine supplies.’

Read here (Project Syndicate, May 7, 2021)

Share the intellectual property on Covid-19: Jeffrey Sachs

‘The pharmaceutical industry and the governments of several vaccine-producing countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as the European Commission, have been resisting the IP waiver, while 150 public leaders and experts have sent an open letter to US President Joe Biden in support of it. There is no longer any question about who is right. Given the surge of COVID-19 in several regions, most recently in India, the continuing emergence of new and deadly variants of the virus, and the inability of the current vaccine producers to keep pace with global needs, an IP waiver or its equivalent has become a practical urgent need as well as a moral imperative.’

Read here (Project Syndicate, Apr 29, 2021)

The Covid bubble

‘When it comes to this year, growth may yet fall short of expectations. New strains of the coronavirus continue to emerge, raising concerns that existing vaccines may no longer be sufficient to end the pandemic. Repeated stop-go cycles undermine confidence, and political pressure to reopen the economy before the virus is contained will continue to build. Many small- and medium-size enterprises are still at risk of going bust, and far too many people are facing the prospects of long-term unemployment. The list of pathologies afflicting the economy is long and includes rising inequality, deleveraging by debt-burdened firms and workers, and political and geopolitical risks.

‘Asset markets remain frothy – if not outright bubbly – because they are being fed by super-accommodative monetary policies. But today’s price/earnings ratios are as high they were in the bubbles preceding the busts of 1929 and 2000. Between ever-rising leverage and the potential for bubbles in special-purpose acquisition companies, tech stocks, and cryptocurrencies, today’s market mania offers plenty of cause for concern.’

Read here (Project Syndicate, Mar 2, 2021)

A Covid genocide in the Americas?

‘Just as political leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro have forced a reckoning about the historical persistence of fascist politics, so have their disastrous responses to the COVID-19 pandemic renewed the relevance of the concept of genocide. How else are we to come to grips with so many culpably avoidable deaths?’

Read here (Project Syndicate, Jan 18, 2021)

A tale of two economies: Stephen Roach

‘As financial markets celebrate the coming vaccine-led boom, the confluence of epidemiological and political aftershocks has pushed us back into a quagmire of heightened economic vulnerability. In Dickensian terms, to reach a “spring of hope,” we first must endure a “winter of despair.”...

‘With COVID-19 still raging – and rates of infection, hospitalization, and death now spiraling out of control (again) – the near-term risks to economic activity have tipped decidedly to the downside in the United States and Europe. The combination of pandemic fatigue and the politicization of public health practices has come into play at precisely the moment when the long anticipated second wave of COVID-19 is at hand.

‘Unfortunately, this fits the script of the dreaded double-dip recession that I warned of recently. The bottom-line bears repeating: Apparent economic recoveries in the US have given way to relapses in eight of the 11 business cycles since World War II. The relapses reflect two conditions: lingering vulnerability from the recession, itself, and the likelihood of aftershocks. Unfortunately, both conditions have now been satisfied.’

Read here (Project Syndicate, Nov 24, 2020)

The pandemic’s complex cocktail

‘Over the past few years, investors have tended to be richly rewarded for setting aside traditional determinants of market value and focusing on just one thing: plentiful and predictable liquidity injections into the marketplace. But the next few months will likely be a bigger test for this wager. Wall Street has decoupled from Main Street in a way that few expected. It would be a mistake to keep extrapolating into the future without stopping to ask about the mounting collateral damage and unintended consequences.’

Read here (Project Syndicate, Oct 6, 2020)

Fighting the Covid infodemic

‘Countering the COVID-19 infodemic requires not only facts, but also the coordinated and strategic advocacy for which those fighting HIV are renowned. In the face of misinformation, silence kills. All segments of society must act now to dispel myths and amplify the voice of science. Our lives, and especially those of the poorest and most marginalized, depend on it.’

One of the co-authors is Adeeba Kamarulzaman, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Professor of Medicine and Infectious Diseases at the University of Malaya. She is also President of the International AIDS Society.

Read here (Project Syndicate, Sept 18, 2020) 

The Covid silver linings playbook

• The first is that we are living through one of the most exciting and promising periods of medical invention and innovation in history. 
• Second, deeper cross-border private-sector collaboration, often outside the purview of governments, is fueling this process of scientific leapfrogging.
• Third, the economic disruptions resulting from the pandemic have fueled multiple private-sector efforts to collect and analyze a broader range of high-frequency data in domains extending far beyond medicine. 
• Fourth, the COVID-19 shock has raised our collective awareness and sensitivity to low-probability, high-impact “tail risks.”
• Fifth silver lining... The pandemic has led country after country to run a series of “natural experiments,” which have shed light on a host of issues that go well beyond health and economics.
• Finally, the crisis has required many companies to hold candid conversations about work-life balance, and to devise innovative solutions to accommodate employees’ needs.

Read here (Project Syndicate, Sept 15, 2020) 

Winners and losers of the pandemic economy

‘One could draw a few conclusions from these economic realities. For starters, the pandemic economy has accelerated the pre-pandemic trend favoring intangible-asset value creation through firms with relatively fewer employees. We can expect this trend to continue, albeit not at the heightened pandemic-induced pace. Traditional businesses will recover, but the disconnect between value creation across firms depending on intangibles per employee will persist and remain a major economic and social challenge...

‘Finally, given the outsize contribution of digital intangible assets to value creation, it is hard to see a way to reverse the trend of rising wealth inequality. Because the balance sheets of those lower down the income and wealth ladder are largely devoid of assets with high intangible and digital content, the rewards of current economic and technological dynamics will pass them by.’

Read here (Project Syndicate, August 31, 2020)

The post-capitalist hit of the summer

‘The pandemic has reinforced that which has been undermining the foundation of capitalism since 2008: the link between profit and capital accumulation. The current crisis has revealed a post-capitalist economy in which the markets for real goods and services no longer coordinate economic decision-making, the current Technostructure (comprising Big Tech and Wall Street) manipulates behavior at an industrial scale, and the demos is ostracized from our democracies.’

Read here (Project Syndicate, August 31, 2020)

America’s coming double dip

‘Soaring financial markets are blithely indifferent to lingering vulnerabilities in the US economy. But the impact of consumers' fear of COVID-19 on pandemic-sensitive services are unlikely to subside, undermining the case for the uninterrupted recovery that investors seem to expect.’

Read here (Project Syndicate, August 25, 2020) 

Training for the pandemic economy

‘But we can learn from the failure of earlier programs. Their record reveals that training works best when it is closely connected to a real job or occupation. Program design should be informed by detailed government forecasts of the types of jobs that are coming and which skills they will require. Similarly, training works best when firms and industries collaborate on program design, because employers are a source of information about the skills that will be needed. At the implementation stage, on-the-job training – apprenticeships, in other words – is essential, and not only for blue-collar jobs. Although we think of apprentices as machinists and plumbers, increasingly they are nursing assistants and insurance underwriters.

‘Here, Europe has a leg up, owing to strong trade unions that can cooperate with employers’ associations in organizing apprenticeships, and because worker-firm attachments are relatively strong. In the US, progress will be harder...’

Read here (Project Syndicate, July 13, 2020)

Will universities learn from lockdowns?

‘Like many businesses, universities are struggling with how to reopen and are adopting a range of strategies. For example, the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom has announced that its lectures will be online-only until at least the summer of 2021. Others, including Stanford University, are offering a mix of in-person and online classes, as well as spreading out their academic year so that fewer students will be on campus at any time.

‘Make no mistake: COVID-19 represents a massive economic hit to higher education. Dorm rooms are unoccupied, sports stadiums remain empty, and students push back against paying full tuition fees. For many colleges and universities, the drop in revenue from foreign students, especially Chinese, is likely to be painful; numerous smaller and less-endowed schools may close.’

Read here (Project Syndicate, July 6, 2020)

Priorities for the Covid-19 economy: Joseph Stiglitz

‘Because Covid-19 looks likely to remain with us for the long term, we have time to ensure that our spending reflects our priorities. When the pandemic arrived, American society was riven by racial and economic inequities, declining health standards, and a destructive dependence on fossil fuels. Now that government spending is being unleashed on a massive scale, the public has a right to demand that companies receiving help contribute to social and racial justice, improved health, and the shift to a greener, more knowledge-based economy. These values should be reflected not only in how we allocate public money, but also in the conditions that we impose on its recipients.’

Read here (Project Syndicate, July 1, 2020)

The fable of the Chinese whistleblower

‘While initial contact between the two CDCs [of the US and China] was interrupted by the New Year holiday, the coordination between the two countries’ public health officials was much closer – and, as WHO Disease Outbreak documentation verifies, the time lags were considerably shorter – than is widely believed in the West. The contrast with America’s response is striking. Whereas 27 days passed from Zhang’s initial report to the Wuhan shutdown on January 23, the US took exactly twice as long (54 days) to go from its first official diagnosis of COVID-19 (January 20) to Trump’s declaration of national emergency (March 13).’

Read here (Project Syndicate, March 18, 2020)

Preventing a Covid-19 food crisis

‘Nomura’s Food Vulnerability Index ranks 110 countries based on their exposure to large food-price swings, taking into account their nominal GDP per capita, the share of food in household consumption, and net food imports. The latest reading shows that of the 50 countries most vulnerable to a sustained rise in food prices, nearly all are developing economies that account for nearly three-fifths of the world’s population.’

Read here (Project Syndicate, May 15, 2020)

Ethiopia’s Prime Minister calls on developed countries to help Africa through Covid-19

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed calls on developed countries to help Africa through the coronavirus pandemic. The continent has low levels of healthcare spending and will struggle to implement social distancing measures. Ahmed calls for debt relief measures and additional financial aid packages from the IMF.

Read here (Project Syndicate, May 1, 2020)

Will Covid-19 remake the world?

‘Covid-19 may well not alter – much less reverse – tendencies evident before the crisis. Neoliberalism will continue its slow death. Populist autocrats will become even more authoritarian. Hyper-globalization will remain on the defensive as nation-states reclaim policy space. China and the US will continue on their collision course. And the battle within nation-states among oligarchs, authoritarian populists, and liberal internationalists will intensify, while the left struggles to devise a program that appeals to a majority of voters.’

Read here (Project Syndicate, April 6, 2020)