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Global leadership

2020-04-07T22:45:36.144Z


It is not possible to face the pandemic without a global response


The most lacerating crises have long since ceased to be local. Historians are unlikely to find a more representative example of a global crisis in the future than the coronavirus pandemic. Faced with it, the efforts made so far to mitigate its effects on people's health and economy lack common governance and leadership. It is at times like these that the anemia of institutions such as the UN or the different G formations that have been created (the G5, G7, G8 or G20) over time is most emphasized. A virus has knocked out the planet and is leaving it on the brink of the worst crisis since the Great Depression. Its management, the neutralization of its most harmful effects on the well-being of humanity, cannot be tackled without equally global coordination.

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This is the fundamental message of the manifesto, in the form of an open letter to the governments that make up the G20, signed by more than 200 personalities who enjoy intellectual influence or have held government responsibilities and in various supranational institutions (including two former presidents of Spain, Felipe González and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero). The signatories are right to emphasize that the sanitary resolution of the pandemic is the necessary condition to manage the brutal economic emergency. The urgency of global leadership has never been so explicit as now.

That was the role that was attributed during the Great Recession to the recipient of the missive, the G20, which includes the world's richest countries and the most powerful emerging countries. The G20, with its imperfections, is the most representative formation of the distribution of power in the world and of the ability to influence the management of global problems. That is why the signatories turn to them to demand concrete, quantified actions that address the two existing priorities: the neutralization of damage to health and support for the economies of the countries with the least defensive capacity.

The first line of defense requires much more strengthening of the health resource base, from sacrificed and understaffed staff to allocations to specific vaccines and therapies, including global coordination of supplies or specific attention to countries with weaker health systems (those who do not yet have a welfare state). The second line of action addresses equally global economic decision-making, convinced that the threat of global depression is no longer a mere hypothesis. Beyond the decisions of central banks and the governments of advanced economies, the two large multilateral institutions, the IMF and the World Bank, must play an active role in the provision and mobilization of financial support, or in direct aid to easing the debt burden of less advanced economies.

The amount of certain items can be discussed, but not the demand to respond to the pandemic nature of the problem with those truly ecumenical aspirations that Keynes claimed at the meeting from which the Bretton Woods agreements emerged in 1944.

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Source: elparis

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