Major multilateral institutions have long claimed that their market-oriented trade rules reduce poverty and advance development. Instead, they hold back the developing world from a more human-centric, social-justice approach that it needs to reach its potential. South Africa has the potential to set an example of how a global “middle power” can drive change. The Covid-19 pandemic has provided extra impetus – and a test.
The need for cross-border data sharing throughout the Covid-19 pandemic has shown that the future of multilateral threat management will hinge on steady yet flexible open-data publishing norms and multilateral data-transfer agreements. In many ways, India typifies the perspectives and needs of emerging economies related to data sharing, data flows, and related commercial regulation.
Georgia remains a developing country even three decades after its independence from the Soviet Union and despite its strategic location and abundant natural resources. It has benefited to a limited extent from foreign investment and relatively recent free-trade agreements with the EU and China. But its full emergence as an economically and politically resilient State has been hampered by modernization driven development agenda and neoliberal policies with too little regard for their social and environmental impacts in Georgia, as well as highpressure, counter-productive trade- and lending policies imposed by global powers such as the IMF, the EU, the United States, and China.
The absence of an integrated digital market and a unified political vision for tech policy in Latin America and the Caribbean puts the countries of the region at risk of dependency on a foreign private sector for their digital transformation. The investment that will be required to recover from the pandemic offers a unique chance to break out of the current market logic and treat technology as critical social infrastructure that must be sustainable and requires citizen participation.
The global Covid-19 pandemic has hit Colombia strongly. This article presents an overview of the vaccination programme in Colombia and some recommendations for international actors to speed up the process and guarantee equitable access to vaccines.
After the first cases of COVID-19 were detected in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia last spring, the three countries embarked on very different courses of action to tackle the virus. While Georgia moved to quickly close its borders and initiated a strict lockdown, Armenia and Azerbaijan were slower to respond, though both eventually instituted lockdowns of their own. Over the last year, other events in the region have overshadowed the pandemic to some extent.
The outbreak of the pandemic could have spelled disaster for Venezuela, already two decades into a political, social, economic and health crisis. The combination of a collapsed national health system and economy, a complex humanitarian emergency, a continuous stream of migration, an internal political conflict with international ramifications, a population with high levels of malnutrition, has seriously hindered the development of a successful vaccination programme. Thus far, Venezuela has administered the fewest number of Covid-19 vaccinations in relation to its population size of all the countries in South America.
Health inequality increased sixfold in South Africa under COVID-19, suggesting that the crisis affected the health of the poor far more than the relatively well-off. Race is not a significant predictor of vaccine hesitancy, but trusting social media as an information source is positively correlated with vaccine hesitancy. South Africa has pushed hard against opposition to the proposal for a waiver of IP for COVID-19 technologies at the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
The rate of COVID-19 vaccination in Israel is one of the highest in the world. However, vaccine rates are not evenly distributed among the different population groups. Arab citizens and the Ultra-Orthodox population, who have suffered the most from the pandemic, are vaccinated at lower rates than the general public. Moreover, social media disinformation campaigns that have characterized the COVID-19 pandemic in Israel, in general, and the vaccine, in particular, has been one of the causes of vaccine hesitancy.
The Covid-19 pandemic has become Chile’s most consequential public health challenge in a century. Chile’s measures included guidance regarding, among other items, education, health (sick leaves, diagnoses, hospital capacity, partial and spatially targeted lockdowns), mass events, border controls, supply and transportation. Since then, the evolution of the disease in the country has been similar to that of other countries around the world, with periods when cases increased followed by periods when cases declined, yet without ever declining to a point when one would assume the emergency was over.
