The World Health Organisation (WHO) came around late last week and declared the Wuhan coronavirus a global health emergency. A lot has been written about it, and more will undoubtedly be written. Meanwhile, the number of infections will increase, as will the death toll.
One of the issues that ought to be discussed is the weaknesses in international co-operation, the management of globalisation and, in particular, the transnational spread of communicable diseases. The spread of the virus comes at a time when the multilateral system is at its weakest, at the end of two decades that have dragged the world towards an abyss.
Yet the period started out with some optimism. In 1999 the UN Development Programme (UNDP) published a fairly comprehensive set of policies and proposals, cast as global public goods (GPG) “to improve international co-operation”, and “better manage globalisation”.
The proposals were directed at better managing six main areas of a “multidimensional crisis” linked to globalisation: environmental and heritage sustainability, market efficiency and stability, justice and equity, global health, knowledge, and peace (including state frailty or failure). The GPG framework was shaped by orthodox economics, with an attendant assumption that what is good for, say, Wisconsin, is good for, say, Rakhine State in Myanmar.
In other words, the GPG concept of public goods (things like traffic lights or public libraries), based on Paul Samuelson’s thesis, necessarily assumes a harmony of interests among all human beings in the world — never mind the diversity, complexity and multiplicity of preferences of 7-billion individuals.
It drew, also, on the idea that “history had ended”, that liberalism reigned supreme and that each of the 7-billion people were converging on a culture of consumer capitalism.
It’s easy to identify the failure to address the six or so crises. Over the past 20 years we have had the attacks on New York and Washington; the wars on the people of Afghanistan and Iraq; the global financial crisis; the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, and of heritage sites in Syria, Iraq and India; the climate crisis; and the growth of inequality in the world.
It is easy to conclude that GPG, as a policy framework, has failed to “better manage” international co-operation and globalisation. It really depends on whether you believe things like inequality, justice and the environment may best be served through a frame of orthodox economics.
Let us get back to the Wuhan coronavirus.
One of the specific concerns raised in the first volume on GPG in 1999 is the transnational spread of communicable diseases. In this area (again, it depends on where one stands on the orthodox economics moorings of GPG), the approach has not been successful. The transnational spread of communicable diseases was one of the specific things the UNDP wanted to “better manage” through the GPG framework.
The rapid transnational spread of the Wuhan coronavirus (like the spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and Ebola viruses) is an almost direct result of globalisation.
This is not to say there were no epidemics or pandemics before intercontinental flights and the functional integration of the political economies of sovereign states. They just took longer to spread across territories. For instance, bubonic plague (Black Death) was presumed to have started in Asia (mainly in China) in the early 1300s.
It reached southern Europe in 1347, and took a further two years to reach England. That, anyway, is the most popular account. Compare this with the SARS outbreak of 2003, which spread around the world within a few days. Ditto the Wuhan coronavirus.
We should not underplay the likely social and political effect of the Wuhan coronavirus. Time will tell. By the time it was declared a global emergency cases had been reported in Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea, Malaysia, Japan, Australia, France, Germany, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and the US.
Whereas the epicentre of the Ebola virus was in West Africa (which made it an epidemic), which had relatively underdeveloped links with most parts of the world, the Wuhan coronavirus reportedly originated in China’s industrial heartland. The city’s airport serves three of China’s main airlines, with flights to destinations as far away as London, New York, Rome, Istanbul, Dubai, Paris and Moscow. In 2016, more than 20-million people travelled through the airport. This makes it likely to become a pandemic.
It is not clear, at the time of writing, what the UNDP (the originator of the GPG approach to addressing transnationally communicable disease), have to say about tackling recurrent transnationally communicable diseases. But looking back over the past two decades there has probably not been a single one of the six or seven areas identified by the UNDP in 1999 where there have been any major successes or achievements.
• Lagardien, a visiting professor at the Wits University School of Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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