How the pandemic is hitting the reset button on the world economy and international cooperation

The Western media, still suspicious of China, have bent over backwards to laud anti-Covid-19 efforts in South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. But the world’s experts must work together to dig us out of this mess, then prepare for the next pandemic

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G20 leaders hold an online summit on March 26 to discuss the coronavirus. Photo: AFP

Published: 9:30am, 6 Apr 2020Updated: 9:51am, 6 Apr 2020

Last September, business leaders and academics across Europe and the US began calling for a reset: the need for businesses to act more sustainably, to treat their stakeholders more equitably, and global warming seriously. They were focusing on ESG – “environmental, social and governance” – factors.

Six months later, as an unforeseen global pandemic sweeps grimly across the globe, the calls for a reset have become more urgent than ever. But the reset is also being redefined. And the global recession that is being unleashed by the pandemic has massively compromised our social and economic capacity to move towards even a modest reset.

Just when business leaders need to cooperate and apply vision to redefine their roles in society, they have been plunged into an unprecedented struggle to save jobs and fend off bankruptcy.

At the same time, just when we urgently need our political leaders to come together and lay the international foundations for this reset, they are being sucked into national emergencies facing their hospital and health systems, and the challenge of saving thousands of lives.

Just as our governments need to cooperate in bringing the pandemic under control and minimising the harm from having to shut down our economies, so the prospects of international cooperation are arguably worse than at any point in the past seven decades.

Three years of “America first” politics from the White House has shaken the foundations of international cooperation, and of the institutions set up after the second world war to ensure cooperation. Two years of attritional trade war have weakened all our economies, deepened the recession we have fallen into, and damaged our ability to drive a recovery.

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