Opinion | Coronavirus pandemic shows it’s time to put people and the planet first

Name: Bundled up for summer, European glaciers covered with blankets to slow melting from climate change
Uploaded: 2020-09-25T00:45:15.000Z
Duration: 2 min 23 s
Description: Bundled up for summer, European glaciers covered with blankets to slow melting from climate change

A recent OECD report calls for countries to move away from a model that priorities GDP growth to one that focuses on human well-being, environmental sustainability and economic resilience

Instead, current tensions indicate we are in danger of falling into war

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Shoppers return to a mall in Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong, on September 13 as the social-distancing rules against the coronavirus are relaxed. Economies must move away from models that focus on moving up the GDP growth ladder. Photo: Felix Wong

Andrew Sheng

Published: 8:45am, 25 Sep 2020Updated: 6:15pm, 25 Sep 2020

Business as usual is dead. What has shaped economic analysis and policy over the past 40 years has failed us. We need urgent structural, rather than incremental, reform.

This sounds obvious and could have been voiced by either a fundamentalist socialist or right-wing populist. But these are declarations from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club for rich countries, in its latest report “Beyond Growth: Towards a New Economic Approach”.

The report was commissioned by OECD secretary general Angel Gurria as part of the organisation’s “New Approaches to Economic Challenges Initiative”, guided by an advisory group of economists who are willing to question the neoclassical thinking that has dominated economic policy formulation for decades. This is the frankest admission by the establishment that its thinking was flawed and that change is urgent and necessary.

The OECD is calling for a paradigm shift away from the present model that focuses on gross domestic growth, ignores people (inequalities) and the planet (ecological destruction and climate change) towards one that prioritises human well-being, environmental sustainability, economic resilience and adaptability to new risks.

In the past decade, developed countries have been experiencing a series of crises – declining productivity, rising inequality, financialisation of debt, technological disruption, deteriorating jobs and quality of life, civil wars, natural disasters and the rising risk of global war. But why were they blind to the crises that those at the bottom of the pyramid, the bottom 40 per cent of the population, suffer every day?

02:23

Bundled up for summer, European glaciers covered with blankets to slow melting from climate change

The OECD report blames it on the current economic paradigm. Policymakers’ current obsession with quantitative GDP growth completely ignored the qualitative change in the well-being of both people and the planet. Worse, the brand of capitalism that exploits through colonisation of new lands and people, first through gunboats, then through money, and finally through the mind, treats Mother Nature as another commodity to be take advantage of.

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