By Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana The world is emerging from the biggest social and economic shock in living memory, but it will be a long time before the deep scars of the COVID-19 pandemic on human well-being fully heal.
In the Asia-Pacific region, where 60 per cent of the world lives, the pandemic revealed chronic development fault lines through its excessively harmful impact on the most vulnerable. The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) estimates that 89 million more people in the region have been pushed back into extreme poverty at the $1.90 per day threshold, erasing years of development gains. The economic and educational shutdowns are likely to have severely harmed human capital formation and productivity, exacerbating poverty and inequality.
By Benny Kuruvilla
As the pandemic spills into its second year, the WHO tracker lists eight Covid-19 vaccines already in public use. Several others are awaiting regulatory approval. This is unprecedented in vaccine history and with effective international coordination, it presents the global community with a real chance for both pandemic and economic recovery in 2021.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres wrote on Twitter: “We must get to work to make sure the vaccine is available to everyone, everywhere. With this pandemic, none of us are safe until all of us are safe.”
Benny Kuruvilla heads the India office of Focus on the Global South, an Asia-based think tank providing analysis and building alternatives for just social, economic and political change.
Wearing a full protective suit, a woman doctor who leads a group of volunteer medical professionals attending to COVID-19 patients at a community hospital in the Philippines. Credit: UN Women/Louie Pacardo
NEW DELHI, India, Feb 4 2021 (IPS) - As the pandemic spills into its second year, the WHO tracker lists eight Covid-19 vaccines already in public use. Several others are awaiting regulatory approval. This is unprecedented in vaccine history and with effective international coordination, it presents the global community with a real chance for both pandemic and economic recovery in 202
04 November 2015 -
Global trade has real impacts on the lives, livelihoods and liberties of people and all else on Earth. Yet, only a handful of people engage in the making of trade rules, leaving the space open for trade negotiators, foreign diplomats and big businesses to set the terms.
The rules for global trade are currently made under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and its agreements. The WTO succeeds the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT 1948-1994), which was meant to bring peace and prosperity to the world post the Second World War.
We have seen two decades of the WTO (1995-2015). The Organisation celebrated twenty years at a Public Forum in early October held at its Secretariat in Geneva on the theme “Trade Works”.