World power being redistributed
Welcome to a new world, a world shared between the rising superpower of China and the established superpower of the United States, as the coronavirus crisis accelerates competition and intensifies tension in a battle that has been simmering for some time. Let’s look at the “small” picture. US Presid…
Freedom House: Serbia, Montenegro, Hungary ‘No Longer Democracies’
A new report from watchdog organisation Freedom House describes Serbia, Montenegro and Hungary as ‘hybrid regimes’ rather than democracies because of declining standards in governance, justice, elections and media freedom. Freedom House’s latest ‘Nations in Transit’ report, published on Wednesday, s…
How the Sustainable Development Goals can help cities focus COVID-19 recovery on inclusion, equity, and sustainability
Prior to COVID-19, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were gaining traction among local governments and city leaders as a framework to focus local policy on ambitious targets around inclusion, equity, and sustainability. Several cities published reports of their local progress on the SDGs in V…
UN health agency hails 7.4 billion Euro pledge for COVID-19 treatments
World leaders on Monday pledged 7.4 billion Euros to support research and development for medicines to fight COVID-19 which the top UN health official has hailed as “a powerful and inspiring demonstration of global solidarity”. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was updating journalists about the outcome of…
Salvaging Globalization
Like other recent systemic crises, the coronavirus pandemic has confronted us with an inconvenient truth: the risks associated with international openness might very well outweigh the gains. If today’s multilateral frameworks are to have a future, they must be brought back into the service of nation…
Fu Ying on why China and America must co-operate to defeat covid-19
China is neither the former Soviet Union, nor intent on becoming the next America. ext is available here. THE TRADITIONAL Chinese festival of Qingming, or tomb-sweeping, on April 4th, is a day to remember loved ones who have passed. This year Chinese across the country mourned lives lost to the covi…
The pandemic is too important to be left to the scientists
For all of us who have watched with mounting terror as President Trump offers the public a series of half-baked ideas and hunches on how to handle, treat and cure covid-19, the solution seems obvious: Follow the science. Trump’s detractors have taken up this mantra. “Follow the science, listen to th…
The Deadly Urgency of Now
LONDON – “This is not a discrete one-off episode,” Wellcome Trust head Jeremy Farrar has warned. “This is now an endemic human infection.” COVID-19, as Farrar suggests, knows no boundaries, geographic, political, or otherwise. Nor must our efforts to defeat it. No one can be truly safe unless the di…
The Coming Greater Depression of the 2020s
While there is never a good time for a pandemic, the COVID-19 crisis has arrived at a particularly bad moment for the global economy. The world has long been drifting into a perfect storm of financial, political, socioeconomic, and environmental risks, all of which are now growing even more acute. N…
Financing SDGs under a new normal: Challenges and response to COVID-19 pandemic
The year 2020 has witnessed an unprecedented COVID-19 crisis where many human lives have been lost. We have also witnessed the tremendous magnitude and speed of collapse in economic activity– something unseen in our lifetime. This is certainly not good for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals…