Anis Chowdhury

Instead of a health system striving to provide universal healthcare, a fragmented, profit-driven market “non-system” has emerged in recent decades. The 1980s’ neo-liberal counter-revolution against the historic 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration is responsible for this.

Hopes for an inclusive global economic recovery are fast fading. As rich countries have done little to ensure poor countries’ access to vaccines and fiscal resources, North-South “fault lines” will certainly widen.

At least 85 poor countries will not have significant access to coronavirus vaccines before 2023. Unfortunately, a year’s delay will cause an estimated 2.5 million avoidable deaths in low and lower-middle income countries.

Refusal to temporarily suspend several World Trade Organization (WTO) intellectual property (IP) provisions to enable much faster and broader progress in addressing the Covid-19 pandemic should be grounds for International Criminal Court prosecution for genocide.

The World Bank has been leading other multilateral development banks (MDBs) and international financial institutions to press developing country governments to “de-risk” infrastructure and other private, especially foreign investments.

The United Nations’ renamed World Social Report 2020 (WSR 2020) argued that income inequality is rising in most developed countries, and some middle-income countries, including China, the world’s fastest growing economy in recent decades.

The World Bank has finally given up defending its controversial, but influential Doing Business Report (DBR). In August, the Bank “paused” publication of the DBR due to a “number of irregularities” after its much criticised ranking system was exposed as fraudulent.

The World Bank leadership must urgently abandon its “Maximising Finance for Development” (MFD) hoax. Instead, it should resume its traditional multilateral development bank role of mobilising funds at minimal cost to finance developing countries.

As the epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic shifts from China to the developed West, all too many rich countries are acting selfishly, invoking the “national interest”, by banning exports of vital medical supplies.

Much recent unrest, such as the “yellow-vest” protests in France and the US “Abolish the Super-Rich” campaign, is not against inequality per se, but reflects perceptions of changing inequalities. Most citizens resent inequalities when it is not only unacceptably high, but also rising.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation (WTO), all dominated by rich countries, have long promoted trade liberalisation as a “win-win” solution for “all people—rich and poor—and all countries—developed and developing countries”, arguing that “the gains are large enough to enable compensation to be provided to the losers”.

Over the last four decades, growing concentration of market power in the hands of oligopolies, if not monopolies, has been greatly enabled by ostensibly neoliberal reforms, worsening wealth concentration and gross inequalities in the world.

Economic inequality—involving both income and wealth concentration—has risen in nearly all world regions since the 1980s.

A new United Nations report warns that the potential benefits to developing countries of digital technologies are likely to be lost to a small number of successful first movers who have established digital monopolies.

The world economy remains tepid and unstable a decade after the 2008 financial crisis, while growing trade conflicts are symptoms of deeper economic malaise, according to a new United Nations publication.

George Soros, Bill Gates and other pundits have been predicting another financial crisis. In their recent book, Revolution Required: The Ticking Bombs of the G7 Model, Peter Dittus and Herve Hamoun, former senior officials of the Bank of International Settlements, warned of "ticking time bombs" in the global financial system waiting to explode, mainly due to the policies of major developed countries.

As feared, the Eleventh Ministerial Conference (MC11) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on December 10-13, 2017 ended in failure. It failed to even produce the customary ministerial declaration reiterating the centrality of the global trading system and the importance of trade as a driver of development.