Dr. Augusto Lopez-Claros has had a distinguished career as an international economist, working at senior levels in such organizations as the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. He recently gave a keynote address at a Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Global Challenges Foundation event regarding the state of global governance in the time of COVID-19.
In that lecture as well as in other public pronouncements on the subject he has noted that scientists have already pointed out the growing frequency of viruses over the past couple of decades which made the jump from animals to humans; it was the emergence of SARS, MERS, EBOLA and others that led many to ask whether something like COVID-19 would not make an appearance at some point, reflecting the relentless, aggressive, invasion of human activity into animal habitats, facilitating the transmission of diseases from animals to humans. World population at the outset of the millennium was around 6 billion; the latest UN forecasts anticipate an expansion from around 7.8 billion today to 9 to 10 billion by 2050, the overwhelming majority of which will be concentrated in dense urban settings. This, in turn, will mean more housing, road infrastructure, farmland to grow food, further compressing the space occupied by humans and virus-carrying animals like bats. Climate change is also putting ecosystems under stress, forcing animals to migrate and come into closer contact with human populations, which are then potentially exposed to viruses against which we have no immunity. Further infections with pandemic potential can be expected.
There is also the danger of existing diseases presently controlled by antibiotics reemerging as a global threat. Scientists have alerted us about the dangers of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, already leading to tens of thousands of fatalities across the world every year. Over-prescription of antibiotics, and their extensive use in livestock, are eroding their effectiveness for disease control. If antibiotics of last resort start to fail, old pandemics could return.
One feature of the coronavirus and other such pathogens in a globalized world is that they pose risks to the entire human species. Smallpox, which as recently as 1967 infected 15 million people and killed 2 million that year, was finally declared eradicated in 1980, because it was only then that the World Health Organization could state with some confidence that all people in all countries had been vaccinated. Closing national borders provides no reliable insurance against the spread of disease, and it is neither desirable nor practical to reverse or undo centuries of economic integration. A more realistic solution argues Dr. Lopez-Claros—and one certainly less destructive of human prosperity than if we were to attempt to deglobalize—might be to seek to expand basic health care and social protections to a larger fraction of the world’s population, not only for social equity, but also as a way to minimize the systemic risks for the people of the world and the economy associated with having populations that are particularly vulnerable to pandemics.
