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Courtney Brown — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 14:11:29 +0000

One of the hoped for outcomes from the upcoming 12th Ministerial Conference in Geneva June 12-15, 2022 is a possible agreed outcome on the WTOʼs response to the COVID-19 pandemic including some action on intellectual property issues.

I have previously reviewed the possible elements of the response to the pandemic and a not finalized draft intellectual property document among the European Union, United States, India and South Africa.

Equitable access to vaccines has been a matter of concern to many countries and the focus of the effort by India and South Africa to obtain a waiver from TRIPS obligations for vaccines, therapeutics and more for a period of years to address the pandemic.

There has been dramatic increases in production capacity for existing vaccines with significant efforts to expand production in developing countries including low income countries.

The WHO has set the objective of getting 70% of the worldʼs population vaccinated by this summer, a goal that should be achievable based on production capacity. Unfortunately, it is clear that for low income countries generally and for Africa as a continent, the 70% target will not be met. It is also not likely that lower middle income countries will reach the target either. The WTO-IMF vaccine information available from the WTO webpage is currently updated through the end of March 2022. Specifically when examined on an income level basis (World Bank definition), low income countries have only 12.0% of their population fully vaccinated (15.2% with at least one dose); lower middle income countries have 48.4% of their population fully vaccinated (57.3% with at least one dose). These rates compare to 72.6% of Upper middle income countriesʼ populations being fully vaccinated and 73.2% of high income countriesʼ populations. On a continent-wide basis, Africa has only 15.3% of its population fully vaccinated; Oceania is at 62.3%; North America is at 62.7%; Europe is 65.1%;, Asia is 67.8%; and South America is 73.0%.

Shockingly, data on a monthly basis show total supply declining in each of the first three months of 2022 compared to December 2021 and, in fact, below every month since June 2021. March 2022 appears to be roughly 1/3 of supply from December 2021. WTO-IMF COVID-19 Vaccine Trade Tracker, at Table 4. This decline in volume is despite new vaccine producers of vaccines being approved and UNICEFʼs tracking of capacity showing 2022 ranging from 16.8-20.9 billion doses versus the 2021 rate of 11.5 billion.

Since last fall, there have been news stories about countries with low vaccination rates not being able to accept all deliveries scheduled.

The causes can vary from vaccine hesitancy (which can be higher in countries with low death rates such as much of Africa), to challenges with distribution (particularly to rural parts of countries), to weak health care infrastructure and more.

Moderna, one of the major mRNA vaccine producers, had its annual shareholders meeting on April 28, 2022. One of the shareholder initiatives voted on was whether the company should generate a Report on Feasibility of Transferring Intellectual Property. The proposal was rejected by over 3/4th of the votes. But in a document released by the company, there is a description of the large volume of production that has not been accepted or delayed and the resulting reduction of production that Moderna is going through because of a lack of demand.

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“Beginning in the summer of 2020, the Moderna team was engaged with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, on behalf of the COVAX Facility, hoping to secure a commitment from them to procure a significant number of Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. An agreement was not reached until April 2021, though we were pleased to commit up to 500 million doses to COVAX – a number that was subsequently increased to 650 million doses. Similarly, we were proud to reach an agreement with the African Union to supply 110 million doses, which we were prepared to start delivering as early as the fourth quarter of 2021. In each case, we offered these vaccines at our lowest price, and in the latest agreements the price for each of these organizations was $7 per 100 μg dose.

“Despite our efforts, ultimately COVAX and the African Union deferred or declined hundreds of millions of doses of Modernaʼs vaccine. While we were prepared to deliver tens of millions of doses to the African Union in December 2021, they asked us to delay delivery, noting that they did not have the means of distributing them. They also declined to exercise an option for 60 million doses that were available to them in the second quarter of this year.

“Similarly, COVAX has declined options for over 320 million doses that Moderna was prepared to deliver in 2022, noting that they have ample access to vaccines. And even for those doses where COVAX submitted a firm order covering the first and second quarters, they have asked to defer delivery. As a result, Moderna is incurring significant costs as it winds down relationships with outside manufacturers who were engaged to produce these declined doses.

“Asking Moderna to transfer intellectual property to local manufacturers—as the Oxfam America proposal suggested—when hundreds of millions of doses are being declined and already operating manufacturing plants are being idled will do nothing to accelerate the end of the pandemic. It would also require diverting Moderna personnel already engaged in manufacturing with other partners, or who are working on other initiatives, including the companyʼs Global Health strategy as described below.

The WTO-IMF COVID-19 Vaccine Trade Tracker in its table 4 on total supply shows that supply by all or nearly all major COVID vaccine producers has declined on a monthly basis since December 2022 including for Sinovac, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Sinopharm, Moderna, J&J, Sputnik and other. Thus, the reduction in production is not limited to mRNA products or to just Moderna.

So the challenges of vaccinating the world against the COVID-19 pandemic continue but are not driven in 2022 by availability of the vaccine or even access to the vaccine. Neither waiver of TRIPS obligations nor easier compulsory licensing of the COVID-19 vaccines will solve the underlying ongoing issue of vaccinations.

The draft intellectual property document being worked on by the EU, U.S., India and South Africa that when signed o on by those four will need to be considered by the WTO Membership as a whole, is limited to vaccines, with therapeutics and other elements of goods needed to address the pandemic potentially addressable in six months after an agreement. If the draft agreement among the four (actual language has not been finalized and reportedly has not been signed o on by the U.S., India and South Africa) is the intellectual property part of the WTOʼs response to the pandemic, its relevance, if any, will be how Members might look at future pandemics and actions by WTO Members. Its utility for the COVID- 19 pandemic is at the most very limited with more capacity than demand in 2022 and with the major drivers of nonvaccination this year not being availability of vaccines. This means that while there will be potentially symbolic relevance to the IP portion of the package, the meat of the response will be in the areas of keeping markets open, limiting export restraints, improved transparency, etc.

Terence Stewart, former Managing Partner, Law Offices of Stewart and Stewart, and author of the blog, Current Thoughts on Trade.

To read the full commentary from Current Thoughts on Trade, please click here.

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Ashley Singh — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 20:48:18 +0000

The headline-grabbing announcement by the United States and the United Kingdom to help Australia build a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines could be a strategic masterstroke, helping Washington find an important military ally in countering China’s growing naval might (it now boasts the world’s largest, according to the Pentagon), while also reinvigorating U.S. alliances in the Pacific.

But a less noticed move on the same day could matter more: China’s application to join a trade deal that the United States had brokered to counter China’s rise—but then rejected due to internal political strife.

In effect, the moves are a bet: which will matter more a few decades from now, a dozen more nuclear subs on the U.S. side of the ledger or a trade pact that could draw many of the world’s largest and most dynamic economies ever-closer toward China?

For now, the U.S. decision has drawn the most headlines and attention—and for good reason.

Since developing nuclear-powered submarine technology in the 1950s, the United States has only shared it with one country, the United Kingdom. Sharing it now with Australia shows how important Washington views the need to bolster countries on the frontline of conflict with China.

The move also shows that Washington can still win over countries that at one point were unsure whether they had to choose between the United States and China.

As recently as 2018, Australian Prime Minister Scot Morrison said Australia could have it all—security via the United States and a dominant economic partner in China—declaring that “Australia doesn’t have to choose.”

The country’s decision to buy up to a dozen nuclear-powered submarines effectively means it is now choosing, effectively gambling that Washington is in the Pacific to stay—a move that will likely improve morale among anxious U.S. allies, such as South Korea and Japan.

But the move could end up being a problem for Washington for two reasons. The move threatens to compound concerns in Europe about U.S. snubbing of allies, which has already been buffeted in recent months by the unilateral U.S. decision to pull out of Afghanistan. Now, it has blindsided France, nixing its plans to sell Australia conventionally powered submarines. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drain saying it was “brutal, unilateral, and unpredictable.”

This is about more than mercantilistic concerns, calling into question efforts to forge a common trans-Atlantic strategy to counter China’s rise. Until now, both sides have been trying to find a common policy, for example in how to handle human rights violations in Xinjiang, Chinese expansion in the South China Sea, and threats to the self-governing island of Taiwan.

On Thursday, the European Union issued a Indo-Pacific strategy paper that underscored the group’s desire to take that part of the world more seriously—something the United States has urged it to do for years. Many of the paper’s concerns overlap those of the United States, part of a slow alignment of interests to strengthen democracy in Asia.

Now, such cooperation will be harder to achieve, with Washington signaling that cooperation is only a tactic that can be discarded when the chips are down.

But those risks to relations may pale in comparison to a potentially bigger issue—that the benefits of the submarines may matter less than the damage the United States has inflicted on itself in the realm of trade.

For most of the 2010s, the United States pushed a new trade deal called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to bind together like-minded countries around the Pacific Rim in what would have been the world’s largest free-trade deal covering 40 percent of the global economy. One goal was to reduce the countries’ dependency on trade with China and boost U.S. leadership in the region.

The TPP was signed by a dozen countries, including the United States, in 2016. But it came under attack in that year’s presidential election by Donald Trump as a jobkiller. When he won the presidency, the United States withdrew in 2017. The next year, the remaining signatories formed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). President Joe Biden has said he would only support the United States entering the deal if it were renegotiated.

China countered with its own trade deal, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a less ambitious plan that has fewer provisions on labor and the environment.

On Thursday, however, China formally applied to join the CPTPP—seeking to turn the tables on the United States by joining the very trade pact that was designed to counter its rise. Over the past few months, it has held talks with Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, and other nations about joining the group.

China’s membership is far from assured. But it underscores the reality that China is the region’s dominant economic power and that the United States is beset by so many internal battles that it cannot muster the will to join a group that its elites argued for a decade was vital to its strategic interests.

If China were to join and the United States remain on the sidelines, the sub deal could look anachronistic: an effort by Anglo-American countries to play their one, fading advantage—advanced military technology—while allowing China to use its economic power to draw countries inexorably into its orbit.

To read the original blog by the Council on Foreign Relations, please click here.

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Ryan Murphy — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 18:30:41 +0000

For many of us, Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics — a boutique think tank specializing in, duh, international economics — has become the go-to guy for current developments in trade policy. His work tracking the evolution of Donald Trump’s trade war was invaluable.Now he has a highly informative new paper with Thomas Bollyky on the vaccine supply chain. I won’t lie: There’s a lot of detail, and the paper is fairly heavy going. But it’s full of useful details, and it also, I’d argue, tells us some interesting things about the nature of world trade in the 21st century.One thing that caught my eye — probably not the most important thing, but one close to my heart — is that the story of global bodog poker review vaccine production demonstrates the continuing relevance of the so-called New Trade Theory, or as some now call it, the “old New Trade Theory.”

Producing these vaccines is evidently a complicated process, involving facilities in many locations, presumably implying a lot of cross-border shipments of vaccine ingredients. Notably, in Pfizer’s case all these facilities are in the United States and Western Europe, which is typical across pharma firms, although other companies have a few facilities in Brazil and India.So where do vaccine supply chains fit into the theory of international trade?If you’ve ever taken an economics course, you probably learned about the theory of comparative advantage, which says that countries trade to take advantage of their differences. The classic original example, from the early-19th-century economist David Ricardo, involved the exchange of English cloth for Portuguese wine.Comparative advantage is a powerful, illuminating theory — especially because it shows why countries export goods they’re relatively good at producing even if they’re less productive in those industries than potential competitors. Bangladesh is a low-productivity nation across the board (although it has been improving), but its productivity disadvantage is less pronounced in apparel than in other industries, so it has become a major clothing exporter.In the 1960s and 1970s, however, a number of economists began suggesting that comparative advantage was an incomplete story. World trade had been growing over time, but much of that growth involved trade between countries that didn’t seem very different — the United States and Canada, for example, or the nations of Western Europe. Furthermore, what these countries were selling to each other looked pretty similar: There was a lot of “intra-industry” trade like the large-scale, two-way trade in autos and related goods across the U.S.-Canada border.

What was going on? A few economists had long noted that comparative advantage wasn’t the only possible reason for international trade. Countries might also trade because production of some goods involves increasing returns — there are advantages to large-scale production, which creates an incentive to concentrate production in a few countries and export those goods to other countries. Automotive trade between the United States and Canada was a classic example: After the countries established a free-trade agreement for autos in 1965, North American car companies achieved economies of scale by limiting the range of items produced in Canada, exporting these goods and importing other items from the United States.But if trade reflected increasing returns rather than country characteristics, which countries would end up producing which goods? It might be largely random, the result of accidents of history.There was, however, remarkably little economic literature on increasing-returns trade until the late 1970s. Economists don’t like to talk about stuff they find hard to model, and trade models with increasing returns tended to be messy and confusing. Eventually, however, some economists came up with clever ways to cut through the confusion, in papers like this 1980 piece in the American Economic Review:

God, I was young! Anyway, history has a sense of humor. No sooner had economists come up with nifty models of trade between similar countries, driven by economies of scale, than the world economy took a hard turn away from that kind of trade toward trade between dissimilar countries driven by things like large differences in wages.World trade exploded from the mid-1980s until around 2008, a process sometimes called hyperglobalization:

And where trade growth in the ’60s and ’70s had largely involved advanced economies selling stuff to each other, hyperglobalization involved a surge in exports of manufactured goods from relatively low-wage developing countries:

So we had a New Trade Theory, but the new trade we were actually getting was much better explained by, well, old trade theory.

So what does all this have to do with vaccine supply chains? Well, as I already noted, vaccine ingredients are mainly produced in advanced countries — countries that are very similar in their education levels, overall level of technological competence and more. So why wasn’t each advanced country producing the whole ensemble of vaccine-related inputs? Here’s what Bown and Bollyky say:

“The business model that much of the pharmaceutical industry had shifted toward over the previous 25 years involved fragmentation. As tariffs and other trade barriers had fallen globally, information and communications technology (ICT) developed, shipping and logistics efficiency increased, and protection of intellectual property rights steadily improved. The fact that trade could play a greater role in distributing pharmaceutical products globally meant that companies could operate fewer plants but at a larger scale.”

Hey, it’s New Trade Theory in action! And it sure looks as if there was a lot of random historical contingency determining national roles in the pattern of specialization. Europe was initially very dependent on Britain’s exports of lipids — but I doubt that there’s something about British culture that makes the country especially good at lipids. It’s just one of those accidents that play a big role in economic geography.Is there a moral to this story? There’s been a lot of backlash against globalization over the past decade, to some extent justified: Advocates of free-trade agreements oversold their benefits and understated the disruptions they might cause. But the case of vaccine production illustrates a positive side of globalization we tend to forget. These miracle vaccines are incredibly complex products that would have been hard to develop and produce in any one country, even one as large as the United States. A global market made it possible to deliver all the specialized inputs that are saving thousands of lives as you read this.

Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 2000 as an Op-Ed columnist. He is distinguished professor in the Graduate Center Economics Ph.D. program and distinguished scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center at the City University of New York. In addition, he is professor emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

To read the full commentary from The New York Times, please click here.

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Jude Althagafi — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 19:31:46 +0000

Entire books will be written on how the COVID-19 pandemic transformed how we live and work. But, at least in Southeast Asia, it’s led to one irreversible change: the long-predicted shift from the physical to the digital world.

Over the past year, consumers had no option but to go online to shop for groceries, conduct banking, or pursue education. They will undoubtedly maintain much of their reliance on digital services and―at long last―leapfrog to levels of digital adoption in commerce and payments with more advanced omnichannel models, bringing the region to the levels of China or developed countries in the West.

Investors are recognizing Southeast Asia’s value as one of the last digital economy opportunities in the world―and the further growth potential that lies ahead. Each week seems to bring a new headline showing the region’s digital vibrancy, including Singapore-based ride-hailing company Grab’s proposed IPO this year for a valuation of nearly $40 billion, Indonesia’s newly formed tech giant GoTo, and an expected IPO for Singapore’s online classified marketplace operator Carousell.

The coronavirus introduced an unanticipated and massive digital adoption spurt. Our research done in partnership with Google and Temasek, and based on Kantar data from Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, showed that over a third of consumers are new to digital platforms, and over 90% say they intend to continue using those platforms after the pandemic.

The numbers tell an impressive story: 40 million new Internet users were added in 2020; 400 million, or 70% of the region’s population, are now online. The Internet economy remains resilient at US$100 billion gross merchandise value (GMV) per year, even with the global slowdown.

And as more consumers and SMEs come online, and with a continuously supportive ecosystem and regulatory environment, the size of the digital economy could be as large as $300 billion, a significant scaling opportunity, despite an environment made challenging by COVID and market fragmentation.

Digital consumers have already gone through the hard steps of digital adoption: learning how to set up digital payments, shop online, order food, and so on. Continuing to use those services is easy, and for many, it simply will be much more convenient to shop online.

Shoppers are buying more groceries online, and they’re not going back. As intracity travel resumes, so will ride hailing. And the surge in users of digital streaming is likely to continue: More than half of the surveyed users say they intend to continue their video and music subscriptions indefinitely. Yet that prediction comes with a caution for providers of streaming services. Users have also indicated a likelihood to unsubscribe once the trial period ends.

Education and groceries benefited most from the influx of new digital consumers. For example, 55% of users of online education services were new to the services in 2020. In grocery e-commerce, 47% of consumers were new. Meanwhile, 34% of survey respondents in the region said they used food delivery services more now than they had before the pandemic.

However, some of the biggest opportunities exist in the budding digital financial services sector, which spans payments, remittance, insurance, investing, and lending.

Payments are steadily moving online. Based on Kantar research, the average number of cash transactions dropped by 11% during COVID-19, with more merchants shifting online out of necessity. Because of the rise in digital activity, we’ve increased our 2025 global online transaction value estimates from $1 trillion to $1.2 trillion. With rates in 2020 reaching the levels we anticipated for 2025, Southeast Asia achieved five years of consumer adoption in a single year.

Adoption of digital remittances doubled as regulators and employers went online to pay migrant workers electronically, and then helped them transfer funds to their families. Convenience and lower prices will likely sustain behavioral change, with up to 40% of total remittance value expected to be transacted online by 2025.

In insurance, purchases moved online as traditional channels were disrupted during COVID-19. Life and health insurance received an online boost as consumers became more risk-conscious in the pandemic. Microinsurance gained traction and now offers significant potential for serving underinsured segments. According to our research, traditional products don’t sell well online. That means established insurers that rely heavily on agents and bancassurance will need to digitalize their channel mix quickly and adapt new products for the digital channel. With such advances in place, the insurance subsector could grow 31% by 2025.

Southeast Asian consumers are also more comfortable with investing online. There are three primary competitors in online investment: pure-play fintechs (e.g., robo-advisers), consumer tech platforms, and established wealth management companies. Each of these players has sufficient room to address a different customer segment with distinct value propositions. One such fintech firm, Endowus, increased its clients by 20 times and its assets under advice by seven times in the year following its October 2019 public launch. Big players are also paying attention to this space: Grab acquired the startup Bento in February 2020.

Interestingly, the only sector that stalled in 2020 was digital lending, mostly owing to concerns about credit quality amid the pandemic. Yet the long-term opportunity remains bright, given the large number of individuals and companies without access to credit in Southeast Asia, favorable regulators, and continued innovation in credit scoring algorithms. We expect digital lending to be a $92 billion business across the region by 2025.

The rising consumer activity across sectors will generate further capital investments, attract more talent, and drive continued significant growth over the decade ahead. Southeast Asia’s digital economy will finally take its place on the global stage, an unexpected side effect of COVID-19.

Florian Hoppe is a Bain & Co. partner based in Singapore.

To read the full commentary from Fortune, please click here.

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Ryan Murphy — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 16:03:11 +0000

Perhaps surprisingly, little is known about the capacities of different countries to produce vaccines. Official data on global production volumes is not available and trade data only gives an incomplete picture of production capacity. The United States and China, for instance, import and export low levels of vaccines relative to their population sizes, suggesting that major parts of vaccine production are not reflected in trade data.

To understand how COVID-19 has affected global trade in, and production of, vaccines, and to get a sense of where the main capacities to produce COVID-19 vaccines at scale might be found, we looked at global vaccine trade prior to the pandemic and estimated production worldwide, with two main results. First, pre-pandemic, the EU was the world’s largest producer of vaccines. Second, the pre-pandemic market for vaccine was divided into two spheres: rich countries are supplied by EU and US production capacity (with the latter mostly producing for itself), while India was the main producer for developing countries. China produced almost exclusively for its own market.

Evidence since the start of the pandemic indicates that, while broadly COVID-19 has not changed these production patterns, there have been modifications. China has become a major supplier of COVID-19 vaccines to developing countries, using its vaccines as political leverage and benefitting from the fact that the US has yet to export its production, while India has stated explicitly that it will prioritise its own population. In this context, with bodog poker review its substantial production capacity, the EU will play a major role as a global COVID-19 vaccine supplier as the world continues to tackle the pandemic.

The global vaccine trade pre-pandemic

Figure 1 shows the biggest vaccine exporters pre-pandemic (2017-2019). The EU27 as a bloc (ignoring intra-EU trade) was by far the largest exporter of vaccines to the world, both in terms of volumes (44% of total global exports) and value (60.3%). The larger share of value compared to volume indicates that the EU exported relatively more to markets where it could supply at higher prices, ie high-income countries (HICs). Figure 2 shows this: while the EU supplied 60% of the vaccines imported by HICs, it only supplied 12% of the vaccines imported by low-income countries (LICs). The US and the United Kingdom were the major revenue markets for the EU’s vaccines exports, representing 43.4% and 16.7% respectively of total EU revenues from export of vaccines. Taken together, LICs provided only 1.2% of EU revenues from vaccine exports (7.4% from lower-middle income countries, so 8.6% for LICs and lower-middle income countries), but absorbed 3.9% of volumes exported from the EU (33.2% for lower-middle income countries).

With a share of 22%, the US was the second largest exporter in value terms (though only one third of the EU size). But like the EU, the US pre-pandemic mostly exported to other HICs: it represented only 2% of volumes imported by LICs (Figure 2). For India, the opposite was the case. While India was the second-largest vaccine exporter in terms of volumes (24.7% of total global exports) it represented barely more than 2% of vaccines exports in terms of value. This huge discrepancy is linked to the fact that India exported virtually only to LICs, representing 80% of their vaccine imports by volume (Figure 2).

These trade patterns reflect a highly segmented market for vaccines, with HICs representing the bulk of revenues, while LICs represent the bulk of volumes. High-income producers (EU, US) sell vaccines to high-income countries, while India provides vaccines to low-income countries. This notable market segmentation is associated with the licensing practices of the pharmaceutical industry.

The largest life sciences companies by vaccine revenues are: GSK, Merck, Sanofi and Pfizer, which represent about 90% of global vaccine revenues. They license their patents to producers in LICs to produce and sell to LICs, reserving HIC markets for their own production or dedicated HIC licensees. In particular, the Serum Institute of India plays an outsized role as a licensee, supplying vaccines to low-income countries.

Estimating vaccine production capacities

To get a full picture of global vaccines supply patterns before the pandemic, we looked not only at the trade flows, but also at production capacities. In the absence of official data on global vaccine production, we estimated countries’ production volumes from the available trade data. For this, we first estimated internal demand. We looked at countries that are not producers (ie countries that export virtually no vaccines). For these countries, we assumed that their total demand for vaccines is equal to their imports. This gives a sense of what the ‘consumption’-based demand for vaccines is. Based on this approach, we provide a range of estimates. We computed the average imports per capita of non-producing countries and used this to compute demand for all countries. We also looked at the relationship between imports per capita and a ‘vaccine index’ based on the demographics and immunisation rates in the same non-producing countries. We computed estimates both with and without income-level segmentation by country. We then derived production estimates per country as the sum of our estimates of their demand and their net exports.

All estimates produce similar results and give a good sense of the scale of production volumes across the world. Table 1 sets out our estimated production volumes per country. Taken as a whole, the EU is the world’s largest producer of vaccines, closely followed by India, with estimates of around 15.5 million and 14.5 million kilogrammes of vaccines produced yearly, respectively. China with production in the realm of 8 million to 12 million kilogrammes comes in third place. The United States is in fourth place, but with considerably smaller production volumes of 4.5-5.2 million kilogrammes. Other countries with considerable vaccine production capacity are Indonesia, Japan, South Korea and Russia. No African or Latin American country has an estimated production capacity of more than 1 million kilogrammes.

Among vaccine producers, the EU pre-pandemic exported the greatest (estimated) volumes of the vaccines it produced, apart from South Korea, which also has a high export-intensity, but from only a small (estimated) production capacity. China, meanwhile, exported almost no vaccines before COVID-19.

Table 1: Range of estimates of yearly vaccine production (millions of kg, 2017-2019 data)

COVID-19 and the future of vaccine production

While it is tempting to draw conclusions from these numbers about the capacity to produce COVID-19 vaccines, there are couple of caveats. First, our data reflects production capacity in ‘normal’ times (2017 to 2019 averages) and for a broad spectrum of vaccines. It is unclear to what extent new capacity has been installed or how much this capacity has been adapted to produce COVID-19 vaccines at the required scale and speed. More importantly, vaccines pre-pandemic were produced with different technologies.

The leading western producers mostly produce vaccines using viral vector and/or protein technology. Older inactivated virus technology is mostly used in LIC production, most notably in China. For COVID-19, the two Chinese vaccines approved by the World Health Organisation use inactivated virus technology, while vaccines from Astra Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson use viral vector technology (this includes the Serum Institute, which licenses Astra Zeneca vaccines for supply to LICs). However, the vaccines from BioNTech and Moderna use a novel mRNA technology. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was unclear how much of the established vaccine production capacity could be quickly activated for COVID-19 vaccine production, particularly for the novel mRNA vaccines.

Data on COVID-19 vaccine production from Airfinity, a small private firm that specialises in COVID-19 data, shows the similarities and differences compared to the pre-pandemic situation (Figure 3). The biggest producers of COVID-19 vaccines are the same as the biggest vaccine producers before the pandemic (China, the US, the EU and India), but the ranking has changed.

A significant change can be observed in China’s vaccine policy. While China exported hardly any vaccines before the pandemic, it is now the largest exporter of COVID-19 vaccines. Chinese vaccines are mainly exported to a handful of LICs in central and South-East Asia, South America and North Africa. The US, meanwhile, is yet to export any COVID-19 vaccine, as it has prioritised vaccinating its own population first. India, which pre-pandemic was the main exporter of vaccines to LICs and could be a pivotal country for meeting LIC demand, is exporting but redirecting its capacity in order to meet local demand. Russia’s Sputnik V viral vector vaccine has received a lot of media attention, but Russia, although it is exporting more than usual, only plays a minor role in volume terms.

Figure 3: Production and exports of COVID-19 vaccines

Overall, the evidence shows that high-income vaccine producers (US, EU) have, in the pandemic, continued to produce for high-income countries (though the US currently produces only for itself). In the light of our data, it is unsurprising that keeping global vaccine markets open was less of a priority for the US than the EU, given the much greater pre-pandemic export intensity of EU vaccine production.

However, for LICs, India’s apparent big step back during the pandemic from its role of exporter could be bad news. Until now, India has been the major supplier to LICs. Interestingly, China (and Russia, to a smaller degree) has seized the opportunity to increase production and exports to LICs.

Outlook

The pressing question currently is how to increase the volume of COVID-19 vaccines available to the world and, more specifically, to low-income countries. The developing world until now has relied on India for vaccines. Can other suppliers and countries scale up in the face of India’s retrenchment in the face of the devastating COVID-19 wave in India in spring 2021? China has significantly increased its capacity and now exports massively to low-income countries, but will be constrained by the willingness of countries to take up China’s vaccines, which use the older inactivated virus technology. Even if the US changes policy and exports more of its unused capacity, this capacity is not so sizeable.

While much hope has been invested in patent waivers to increase production in LICs, it is unclear if such a policy will work in the short term, given how little experience producers have with mRNA vaccines (making even voluntary licensing deals difficult). Even for vaccines based on the old inactivated vaccine or viral vector technologies, further transfers of production know-how are needed.

This leaves the EU as the main supplier to the world, given its capacity to produce at scale the most sought-after COVID-19 vaccines. In addition, EU producers have a legacy of exporting, though mainly intra-EU or to other HICs. In the medium-term, partnerships with emerging markets will remain absolutely essential. Notable is the EU’s initiative to support the creation of vaccine production in Africa, including through mRNA manufacturing. In addition, since developing markets are not served by European manufacturers in the first place, there is little risk of harming EU industry.

Lionel Guetta-Jeanrenaud is working at Bruegel as a Research Assistant. He studied economics at the Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon, in France. Before joining Bruegel, Lionel worked as a research assistant at the Department of Economics of Harvard University.

Niclas Poitiers, a German citizen, joined Bruegel as a research fellow in September 2019. Niclas’ research interests include international trade, international macroeconomics and the digital economy. He is working on topics on e-commerce in trade as well as European trade policy in global trade wars. Furthermore he is interested in topics on income inequality and welfare state policies.

Prof Dr. Reinhilde Veugelers is a full professor at KULeuven (BE) at the Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation. She is a Senior Fellow at Bruegel since 2009. She is also a CEPR Research Fellow, a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and of the Academia Europeana. From 2004-2008, she was on academic leave, as advisor at the European Commission (BEPA Bureau of European Policy Analysis). She served on the ERC Scientific Council from 2012-2018 and on the RISE Expert Group advising the commissioner for Research. She is a member of VARIO, the expert group advising the Flemish minister for Innovation. She is currently a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of the journal Science and a co-PI on the Science of Science Funding Initiative at NBER.

To read the full commentary from Bruegel, please click here.

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Ryan Murphy — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 19:25:32 +0000

During the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for semiconductor chips, a key component of all electronics, skyrocketed as many jobs and crucial services moved online and workers upgraded their home offices. Combined with major supply disruptions, the result has been a worsening semiconductor shortage. In May, wait times for chip orders stretched to 18 weeks, four weeks longer than the previous peak. The supply crunch has hit a range of sectors. Automotive plants have idled as they await delivery of chips used in their cars. Makers of microwaves, refrigerators, and washing machines have been unable to fill their orders. Long the obscure concern of experts in the technology sector, semiconductor supply chains have now been thrust into the spotlight.

But the supply of semiconductors was at risk long before the pandemic, and the virus is only partly to blame for today’s shortages. One of the biggest culprits was a sudden shift in U.S. trade policy. In 2018, motivated by national security concerns, the Trump administration launched a trade and tech war with China that jolted the entire globalized semiconductor supply chain. The fiasco contributed to the current shortages, hurting American businesses and workers. Now, the Biden administration must pick up the pieces.

In its first five months, the Biden administration has laid the groundwork for a more resilient semiconductor supply chain. Discarding the nationalistic policies that got the United States into this mess, the Biden administration has reached agreements at summits with Japan, South Korea, and the European Union to cooperate on a new semiconductor strategy. With their overarching goal now set, Washington and its partners must turn to the hard work of hammering out the details. Only then will they be able to protect their national security and stave off another economic crisis.

Weaponizing Trade

The troubles for the United States’ multibillion dollar semiconductor industry started when the Trump administration used it as a pawn to go after Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant and a major chip consumer. For years, Western policymakers worried that Huawei’s shoddy gear was vulnerable to cyber-hacking and thus a threat to critical telecommunications infrastructure. More worrisome were the company’s close ties to the Chinese Communist Party, raising the prospect that Beijing would use Huawei’s 5G network equipment to spy on rivals and steal their military intelligence, governmental communications, or trade secrets.

In January 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Huawei for financial fraud, money laundering, conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of justice, and sanctions violations. On paper, the case had little to do with concerns about national security and 5G networks, but there was no doubt that those issues motivated prosecutors. Unusually, the Trump administration chose not to punish Huawei with financial sanctions. Instead, it weaponized trade. The administration restricted companies from selling to Huawei from the United bodog online casino States by imposing export controls in an attempt to starve Huawei of inputs, especially semiconductors.

The Trump administration had a clumsy approach to a complex supply chain. Modern semiconductor manufacturing is a fragmented process, and even the chips developed by U.S. companies are often not made in the United States. Qualcomm and Nvidia, two major U.S. technology companies, design world-leading semiconductors, but they often farm out the production of those chips to foreign firms, especially Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest contract manufacturer of chips. Because U.S. law was designed to stop exports leaving the United States, the Trump administration’s export control rollout in 2019 could do nothing about chips being made abroad, blunting the policy’s effectiveness.

Export controls imposed by the United States alone were bound to flop. Non-American companies make great chips, too, allowing Huawei to swap out the American semiconductors it used in its 5G equipment with those from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, or Europe. The policy was lose-lose: it ended up hurting U.S. companies and failing to mitigate the national security threat. What is more, the export controls discouraged chip manufacturers from investing in the United States. American producers ultimately faced trade limits that no country besides their own was applying.

Undeterred, the Trump administration reached deeper into the semiconductor supply chain. Huawei’s other suppliers all needed cutting-edge equipment to produce their chips. But many of those tools were also made by U.S. companies, such as Applied Materials, KLA, and Lam Research. So beginning in mid-2020, the administration tried to use the dominance of U.S. equipment manufacturers as leverage with foreign chipmakers that were still selling to Huawei. It presented companies such as TSMC and Samsung with an ultimatum: stop selling to Huawei or lose the ability to use American tools.

These export controls have also had nasty side effects. To TSMC, Samsung, or any other company that was about to invest hundreds of millions of dollars on new chip-making tools produced by U.S. companies, other equipment makers—including Tokyo Electron in Japan or ASML in the Netherlands—were suddenly much more attractive suppliers.

Furthermore, China threw even more money at its already heavily subsidized chipmakers. Under pressure to accelerate its industrial development, Beijing has sought to quickly free itself from the tight grip of Western technologies. Simultaneously, the fear of losing access to the Chinese market has the U.S. semiconductor industry now seeking upward of $50 billion in federal subsidies as part of legislation now winding its way through Congress. By the industry’s reckoning, the conflict with China could threaten a third of its revenues, requiring a new funding source to spur the research and development of future chips.

By cutting off Huawei’s access to semiconductors, the full suite of U.S. export controls imposed in 2019 and 2020 may ultimately hurt the company’s 5G equipment sales enough to protect U.S. national security, although it is too early to say for sure. Nevertheless, the extreme collateral damage from the episode demands that policymakers find a new way to ensure the resilience of the semiconductor supply chain.

The Shortage Heard Round the World

By the time U.S. President Joe Biden took office, the COVID-19 pandemic had laid bare the extent of the semiconductor crisis. Carmakers overreacted to the initial shock of COVID-19 and, in early 2020, slashed orders for chips. By the time the auto companies realized their mistake, chipmakers were already at capacity supplying the suddenly booming market for work-from-home goods. The perfect storm only got worse: Arctic weather in Texas, a drought in Taiwan, and an earthquake and fire in Japan all worked to slow production.

U.S. trade policy also squeezed supply. In July 2018, the Trump administration imposed 25 percent tariffs on imported chips as part of its trade war. Despite growth in the global semiconductor market, the tariffs meant that the United States was buying half as many chips from China in 2020 as it was before the trade war, and imports from elsewhere did not replace those missing semiconductors. Making matters worse, Chinese buyers, fearful of the ever-tightening U.S. export controls, hoarded chips, thus contributing to the global shortage.

The semiconductor shortage was high on the agenda in April when Bidenwelcomed to the White House his first foreign leader, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga. Although there was nothing Biden or Suga could do to immediately boost production and alleviate the shortages facing their auto sectors, they agreed to “cooperate on sensitive supply chains, including semi-conductors.” Similar priorities were set in May at Biden’s summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and in June with leaders from the European Union.

Washington’s efforts to shore up the semiconductor supply chain require bringing each partner into the fold. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Europe are home to some of the world’s most important equipment suppliers and chipmakers. Getting everyone on the same page will require a deft diplomatic touch. Relations between Tokyo and Seoul remain tense, in light of a recent flare-up that led Japan to impose export controls on chemicals critical to South Korean semiconductor producers. Because its companies produce most of the world’s leading chips, Taiwan must also be central to Washington’s efforts. But coordinating policy with Taipei inevitably antagonizes Beijing, which views the island as a renegade province and seeks to eventually reunify it with the rest of China.

On export controls, the semiconductor saga has revealed the need for a common policy that Washington and its partners agree on. Broad, unilateral, and extraterritorial U.S. export controls are not a viable long-term strategy to protect national security. U.S. partners won’t put up with them for long, since democratically elected leaders face domestic pushback when they cede sovereignty to Washington and impose huge commercial costs on their companies. European firms, for example, were quick to accuse the Trump administration of designing its export controls less to address any Chinese national security threat and more to advantage their American competitors.

Extraterritorial controls also won’t work for long, because foreign semiconductor manufacturers will seek to swap out U.S. equipment with tools from alternative suppliers. Once they have done so, Washington loses the only short-term leverage it had over them and over the ultimate target, Chinese firms buying the chips. Preventing this outcome requires collaboration. U.S. partners must both buy into the security threats that China poses and enforce the commonly set export limits on their own firms. Given the difficulties with multinational enforcement, overly broad attempts to control everything are likely to end up controlling nothing. Success may instead demand tighter export limits but on fewer technologies.

Washington and its partners will also need to get more creative. Both the U.S.-Japanese and U.S.-South Korean summits signaled the potential embrace of an innovative policy called “Open RAN.” Under this approach, policymakers would agree on common industry standards that force greater compatibility between different types of 5G equipment. The end goal is to prevent Huawei—or any other 5G equipment provider—from dominating global telecommunications infrastructure. This policy would introduce competition and could weaken the market power of major vendors. It may also be more effective than the existing approach: better to allow for a diversity of suppliers than dedicate resources to killing off one bad actor, such as Huawei, only to see another take its place.

Nevertheless, the United States and its partners will have to accept that aligning their policies comes with costs. If they agree to common export controls, for instance, China will almost certainly carry out a more confrontational foreign and economic policy, intensifying its own efforts to decouple. In turn, semiconductor firms in U.S. partner countries will likely join their American counterparts in losing commercial access to the Chinese market.

Washington and its partners must thus prepare for their semiconductor industries to lose revenues, which fund their considerable R & D expenditures. To ease the sting, they should jointly fund an R & D consortium for firms in allied countries along the semiconductor supply chain. R& D consortiums, which pool resources for chip research to prevent each company from having to reinvent the wheel, are nothing new for the chip sector at the national level. In fact, Japan developed one in the 1970s, as did South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States shortly thereafter. Here, coordinating a new multilateral consortium could also help allied countries withstand pressure to compete among themselves, thus preventing excessive subsidization and a race to the bottom.

Given the uncertain pace and trajectory of semiconductor innovation, there will be bumps in the road. But failing to coordinate the export controls needed to mitigate the most critical national security threats, develop common industry standards, and prevent excessive subsidies to stave off infighting over suppliers—that would be much, much worse.

Chad P. Bown, Reginald Jones Senior Fellow since March 2018, joined the Peterson Institute for International Economics as a senior fellow in April 2016. His research examines international trade laws and institutions, trade negotiations, and trade disputes. With Soumaya Keynes, he cohosts Trade Talks, a weekly podcast on the economics of international trade policy.

To read the full commentary from Foreign Affairs Magazine, please click here.

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Johnny Morris — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 17:07:05 +0000

Since early reports linked the emergence of COVID-19 to the wild meat trade, the pandemic has thrown the wildlife trade into the global spotlight for its role in spreading zoonotic disease pathogens. This has motivated calls to ban wildlife trade, among other proposals to strengthen regulation and control over the trade in wildlife and their parts. Charis Enns, Ekaterina Gladkova, Brock Bersaglio, and Francis Masse of Wildlife Trade Futures report on the need to look beyond wildlife trade bans and towards changing how we interact with nature to minimise the likelihood of future zoonotic pandemics.

Calls to ban wildlife trade to prevent future zoonotic pandemics have proven to be ineffective and difficult to enforce
Measures also risk impacting the food security, livelihoods, and cultural rights of millions of people around the world
Policy action is needed that centres sustainable food systems rather than absolute bans on wildlife trade and continuing support for status quo industrial food systems
Action should include support for practices that minimise the risk of zoonotic disease transmission, such as agroecology and indigenous and community conserved areas

COVID-19 ignited calls to ban wildlife trade

Zoonotic diseases are diseases transmitted from wild and domestic animals to humans. 60% of infectious diseases affecting humans are zoonotic in origin, including malaria, HIV, and various types of influenza. Over the last decade, there have been numerous zoonotic disease outbreaks, including Ebola, Zika, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). However, the unprecedented health and economic impact and rapid global spread of COVID-19 has drawn far more attention to zoonoses prevention than previous zoonotic disease outbreaks.

Early reports linked the emergence of COVID-19 to a market in China where wild animals and meat were sold, the wildlife trade has been front-and-centre in discussions on controlling COVID-19 and preventing future zoonotic spillover events. Proposals have ranged from extreme, total bans of wildlife trade, to the moderate, managing wildlife trade carefully. For example, by better regulating sanitation and hygiene at wildlife trade markets, to focusing on restricting trade in high-risk species and more diligence about illegal, unsustainable forms of trade.

These calls have been met by policy action. In February 2020, the Chinese government imposed a ban on trade and consumption of wild meat. The Vietnamese government and the Government of Thailand took similar steps, banning wildlife imports, closing wildlife markets and enacting greater enforcement against illegal wildlife trade. The United Kingdom is also discussing wildlife trade bans in response to COVID-19. In 2020, an Early Day Motion was submitted for debate in the House of Commons to ban the international commercial trade in wild animals and wild animal products, and to play a leadership role in the end of the global wildlife trade.

Why wildlife trade bans are not the answer

The focus on banning wildlife trade to solve future pandemics is worrying, as the ineffectiveness and negative consequences of wildlife trade bans are well documented in existing research. During the Ebola outbreak in 2013 and 2016, bans placed on wild meat trade not only proved to be ineffective in halting disease transmission, but also pushed trade underground making it even more difficult to monitor and regulate, and thus potentially more risky. Similar impacts were seen during other Ebola outbreaks in Guinea and Nigeria as well.

In addition to undermining local economies and food security, wildlife trade bans can have negative consequences on wildlife conservation. Wildlife trade bans can harm legal, sustainable wildlife economies that give people motivation to conserve species and their surrounding habitats. Wildlife trade bans erode people’s trust in public health and environmental authorities as affected populations often observe ulterior motives behind bans, like preventing hunting and restricting access to natural resources.

Finally, as a key driver of hunting in both developing and developed countries is food preference and food security, new bans on wild meat consumption could increase in domestic livestock consumption. Large-scale deforestation and habitat destruction associated with commercial scale livestock farming and agriculture is a primary risk factor in zoonotic disease spillover. If the intension of banning bodog poker review wildlife trade is to reduce pandemic risks, any measures that could increase industrial livestock production are counterintuitive.

Supporting sustainable, biodiversity-friendly food production systems:COVID-19 and problems created by wildlife trade bans point to the shortcomings of existing food systems. There are initiatives and movements around the world pushing for alternative food systems that could minimise the chance of future zoonotic pandemics. For example, there is scientific evidence that improving support for agroecology – agricultural practices that rely on natural synergies and harness biological diversity for food production – can contribute to improved food security and the protection of wildlife habitats while acting as buffers against zoonotic viral spillover events.

Respecting tenure regimes that minimise the risk of zoonotic disease transmission by conserving biodiversity without impeding on the rights and wellbeing of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs): conserving biodiversity reduces the risk of zoonotic diseases. Various tenure regimes contribute to preventing biodiversity loss, reducing the risk of future pandemics. Problematically, many tenure regimes (e.g. ‘Fortress Conservation’) also violate IPLC rights. ICCAs, which are formally recognised territories and areas conserved by indigenous peoples and local communities, are unique as they restore and respect IPLC rights while protecting biodiversity and creating a buffer between zoonotic disease pools and people. Support for ICCAs should be made a global priority, particularly amidst ongoing debates about the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.

Promotion of just, sustainable wildlife trade governance: in place of wildlife trade bans, improved governance of legal and sustainable wildlife trade is needed. This could include directing trade regulation and enforcement to target types of trade and species that pose serious risks for zoonotic transmission. However, calls to centralise and elevate the governance of wildlife trade risk violating IPLC rights and ignoring the often highly biodiverse and ecologically balanced nature of IPLC territories. Global institutions and governments have an opportunity to learn from IPLCs about sustainable wildlife use and consumption and improve or create new wildlife trade laws and policies that are inclusive of IPLC rights and territories.

Charis Enns is a Presidential Fellow in Socio-Environmental Systems at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester. She is currently working on a project titled ‘Identifying and mitigating the impacts of COVID-19 on legal and sustainable wildlife trade in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs)’.

To read the original commentary from The University of Manchester, please visit here

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Ryan Murphy — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 20:10:41 +0000

Relations between the major powers are at their worst for decades with cooperation thin on the ground, and COVID-19 having deepened suspicions further.

In April, the US Senate passed the Strategic Competition Act with bipartisan support, promising to ‘counter the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party globally’. In front of his American counterpart, China’s top foreign policy official denounced the effrontery of those who ‘smear’ Chinese democracy. Joe Biden calls Vladimir Putin ‘a killer’, while the Kremlin has put the US at the top of its list of unfriendly countries. Tension between China and India is high, the EU and UK are involved in repeated spats. Competition and mistrust are everywhere.

Far from producing greater collaboration in adversity, COVID-19 has exacerbated global rivalries. Given that the tensions long pre-dated the pandemic and are unlikely to improve any time soon, it is hard to see how the major powers can be persuaded to cooperate better to tackle this crisis. Coronavirus is just the first test. Other crises will follow.

President Biden calls the relationship with China ‘naturally competitive, sometimes adversarial and, on key issues, necessarily collaborative’. Managing these competing impulses is proving difficult to navigate. One route is the established one, focusing on international institutions and multilateral groups to tackle the big global challenges. In times of tension they have a restraining role; in times of cooperation, they can do so much more.

Yet, if the disappointing results of the G7 are anything to go by, expectations should be managed even lower than they are already. But there is another way. The present atmosphere of intense competition can actually be exploited to the advantage of developing economies.

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A few weeks into the crisis, Ricardo Lagos, former president of Chile and a member of the Elders group of international leaders wrote: ‘Hopefully the international institutions will rise to the challenge of responding to this pandemic with the force that it demands, because this crisis will not be overcome by defeating the disease in any one country alone, but by guaranteeing an end to the affliction throughout the world.’

The first reaction of nation states was to protect their own, hoard, close borders – and indulge in nationalist points-scoring.

The more the US and its allies blamed China, both for the outbreak in Wuhan and for what many considered to be a cover-up, and the more China refused to provide the necessary access or information, the more distrustful and disjointed the global response became.

The final year of Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ presidency was characterized by a COVID-19 policy of denial, denigration of science and, at that point, the world’s highest infection rate. The president launched repeated broadsides against the World Health Organization (WHO), denouncing its Director General Tedros Ghebreyesus as a ‘puppet’ of China; he announced the termination of the US’s WHO membership and $400m annual payment, putting its finances in peril just at a time when the organization was most needed. Trump’s approach was borne partly of ideology, partly of a need to create a distraction from his administration’s incompetence.

The medical and health community rallied early, creating an initiative designed to distribute vaccines, even as they were still in the early stage of development. The aim of COVAX was to produce and make available two billion vaccines by the end of 2021. ‘No-one is safe until everyone is safe’ became the mantra of collaboration.

Solidarity was not the problem among the organizations – Gavi, the global vaccine alliance, and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) worked with the WHO to get access to the COVID -19 Tools Accelerator, ACT-A, up and running.

COVAX was heralded as the ‘only truly global solution’, but it was a mix of ambition and acknowledgement of the limited commitment of the big powers to collaborate to vaccinate the world. Still, vaccinating ‘the priority fifth’ of the world’s population is better than nothing.

Vaccines and flags

From the start of the pandemic, in the provision of masks or personal protective equipment (PPE), nation states indulged their competitive instincts. Vaccine diplomacy and its alter ego vaccine nationalism followed this trend.

Public relations battles were fought out not just between rivals, but also among supposed allies. The British government juxtaposed its mass purchase of vaccines with the early failures of the European Union (EU) as vindication of Brexit. For its part, the EU’s definition of solidarity was largely confined to the bloc.

Chinese vaccines were present in, or pledged to, 90 countries. Each shipment carried national flags and were accompanied by photo-opportunities with grateful local dignitaries at the airport of arrival.

By the end of May, China had sold or donated 700 million doses worldwide. Chinese vaccines were present in, or pledged to, 90 countries. Each shipment carried national flags and were accompanied by photo-opportunities with grateful local dignitaries at the airport of arrival. The biggest deals were geographically and politically disparate – from Chile to Egypt, Mexico to the Philippines. Russia was in 80 countries. As Champa Patel, director of Chatham House’s Asia-Pacific programme, notes: ‘Russia and China are not new actors on these continents and are sometimes capitalising on long-established political or economic relationships.’

The key question is why China and Russia were faster. China’s heavily enforced early lockdowns kept numbers at home far lower than elsewhere in the world. In Russia, COVID-19 spread rapidly but much of the public was wary of accepting the home-produced vaccine, leading to one of the lowest take-up rates among industrialized nations. At least that freed up stocks to enable the Kremlin to go on a global charm offensive.

Two regions

By late May, Latin America had exceeded one million deaths, the highest for any region in the world. The region was long considered to be the United States’ backyard. Frustrated at the lack of vaccines, several leaders took to social media diplomacy to ‘vaccine shame’ their traditional ally.

In March, president of the Dominican Republic Luis Abinader tweeted: ‘President @JoeBiden, less-developed countries and traditional allies of the USA, like Dominican Republic, have approved the AstraZeneca vaccine and we need it urgently’ while Paraguay was struggling to get Chinese vaccines because of its recognition of Taiwan.

Latin America didn’t help itself. ‘The region has failed to coordinate through existing mechanisms or to act as a bloc,’ says Chris Sabatini, senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House. ‘Combined with the absence of the US, this has enabled others to fill the vacuum and split the region even more deeply.’

Shortly after delivering 400,000 doses to Bolivia, the Kremlin trumpeted access to its resources. ‘We are sure that Russian-Bolivian ties will expand, especially in sectors such as energy, mining and the peaceful use of nuclear technologies,’ Vladimir Putin said after meeting President Luis Arce. Bolivia has the world’s largest supply of lithium – an indispensable component in batteries for mobile phones – but has struggled to attract foreign investment to extract it.

Goodwill was thin on the ground in contract negotiations. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism alleged in February that Pfizer had insisted to several Latin American governments that they put up sovereign assets such as embassy buildings and military bases as collateral against the cost of potential future legal cases.

Africa has received two per cent of vaccines administered globally. The crisis was worsened by India’s decision to divert vaccines from the Serum Institute, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturing facility, which had been earmarked for export to deal with the country’s own COVID-19 emergency.

By May 2021, of 36 countries where death rates were rising, all but four were low- or middle-income countries. The cumulative effect has been to eradicate years of development, leading to a further division of wealth between nations and regions.

The African Union has set a goal of 40 per cent of vaccines to be produced on the continent within 20 years. Reforms such as these, vital though they are in the medium-term, will not alleviate the present crisis.

At first glance, the situation suggests a reversion back to the old paradigm of dependency. Yet there is another way of way of looking at Africa’s present predicament.

‘We are playing out the same thing again – but this time the politics are different,’ says Yates. This, he says, is reflected in the leadership of international agencies as three major UN institutions are now run by Africans. World Trade Organization (WTO) Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is a former Nigerian government minister; UNAIDS’ Executive Director Winnie Byanyima was a Ugandan MP who then ran Oxfam International. The head of the WHO, Tedros, was an Ethiopian minister.

Alex Vines, director of the Africa Programme, notes a series of regional summits with Africa planned for 2022 (several of which had been postponed because of the pandemic), including the EU, China and Turkey. Everyone is piling into Africa – and Africa knows it. ‘The trend is towards multi-polarity,’ he says.

Discussion of big-power winners and losers may actually be missing the point. This narrative assumes that recipient countries have little or no agency and are unable to disaggregate the various motivations and decide for themselves. Therefore, it may not feel like that now, as populations reel, but developing economies have more agency, more influence, than before.

Do motives matter?

A recent Chinese White Paper on international development states: ‘China considers it a mission to contribute more to humanity. Its wish is to offer more public goods to the international community and join forces with other countries to build a better common future’. Humanitarian assistance merges with geo-strategic motives. Is that noticeably different to other countries’ international development policies?

COVID-19 has also given China an opportunity to portray itself as a responsible, science-based global leader, a ‘pharma power’, helping to shift the narrative from its role in the cause of the crisis. Yu Jie, senior research fellow on China, points to another motivation. ‘Ultimately so much of this comes down to economic self-interest. China is pursuing its vaccine diplomacy to help secure its many Belt and Road-related projects. The quicker those developing countries recover from the pandemic, the better it is for China’s own economic growth,’ she says.

Patel points to a failure of analysis among Western powers. ‘What will not work is trying to instrumentalize emerging powers for Western capital’s strategic interests. This is as true for China attempting to do as much as for Western capitals.’

In any case, do motives matter that much in a time of crisis, particularly when the other side is absent from the pitch?

Ideas aplenty

At the start of 2021, the immediate tasks for the world were: share more vaccines now, provide more money for that international endeavour, and get serious about tech transfer to allow production to take place in more facilities around the world.

Just how committed is the Biden administration? A number of its initiatives seemed designed more to project systemic rivalry, particularly against China, than to embrace multilateralism. In early May, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced that Washington would support a waiver on intellectual property for vaccines. A number of countries, led by India and South bodog sportsbook review Africa, had long been calling for the removal of restrictions on the transfer of patents in pharmaceuticals, something that had been agreed at the WTO in 1995. It had become an emotive issue.

Tedros hailed it move as ‘a monumental moment’. The move delighted civil society groups, but startled allies. A number of biotech-strong countries, including Germany, Switzerland, Canada and Britain opposed the idea. The White House is likely to have assumed that it would not prevail, but the initiative secured two goals: it put pressure on big pharma to do more to free up licensing and transferring technology, and it made America look good.

In the same week, Biden declared: ‘Our nation is going to be the arsenal of vaccines for the rest of the world. I literally have, virtually 40 per cent of the world leaders calling and asking, can we help them. We’re going to try’. He promised that the US would deliver 80 million vaccines, including from AstraZeneca, which had not been approved by his own country’s regulator, the FDA.

By this point, the US had not exported a single vial. A whole year after the establishment of COVAX, a mere 70 million vaccines had been sent through the multilateral facility – a tiny proportion of the not so ambitious two billion target.

To compensate at least in part for the political failures, a number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worked hard to find practical solutions to help alleviate the suffering. For its part, Chatham House brought together big pharma, leaders of international organisations and health experts in a global vaccine supply chain and manufacturing summit to look for an agreed set of measures to tackle shortages. The March 2021 summit led directly to the establishment of a COVAX Manufacturing Task Force to address bottlenecks.

Yates, who helped to bring the parties together for that summit, also points to the work of the International Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPPR). In a report commissioned by the WHO and published in mid-May, the group of 13 global statesmen and women, led by former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark and former president of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, sketched out a credible road map across all areas of COVID-19 policy, providing a midway point between radicalism – what should be achieved – and realism – what, given the disappointing circumstances, could be achieved.

The IPPPR called for a UN Pandemic Treaty and an International Pandemic Financing Facility that could mobilise funding of up to $10 billion per year. It also proposed a new global surveillance system, in which the WHO would have explicit authority to publish information about outbreaks without the prior approval of national governments and to dispatch experts to investigate pathogens with guaranteed right of access.

In spite of the exhortations and the clear proposals, the chances of countries coming to any form of meaningful consensus on the pandemic remained elusive. Meeting in Rome, the Global Health Summit of the G20 proposed a watered-down push for waivers and stopped short of committing wealthier states to provide more funds for the WHO. A few weeks later, the World Health Assembly, the WHO’s policy-making body, stepped back even further, delaying even consideration of a convention, agreement ‘or other international instruments on pandemic preparedness and response’ until a special conference in November.

On the eve of each of these forums, elder statesmen and women, health experts and activists urged governments to do more. They cited compelling economic arguments. Fully financing ACT-A for 2021 would cost less than one per cent of what governments have spent on stimulus packages for their own citizens.

The task is enormous and urgent. The number of doses needed to vaccinate 70 per cent of the world’s population is a staggering 11 billion. So far only about 1.7 billion have been produced; far, far fewer have been equitably distributed.

Has the West failed – again?

On the eve of the G7, the director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr John Nkengasong, declared: ‘Our worst nightmare has come to reality’. He added: ‘When this pandemic started, we cautioned that if we do not work in a cooperative way and express global solidarity we may run into a moral catastrophe’.

The messaging NGOs have used to persuade governments has become ever more desperate and ever more instrumentalist. ‘Self-interest’ became too tame. ‘Return on investment’ – a curious term for saving lives – started to be used.

In spite of all the entreaties, COVAX remains low on nations’ priorities. Two reasons point to self-interest of the most unappealing variety. ‘For COVAX to work as its originators intended, it needed essentially all governments to buy into it, rather than making their own deals with potential producers,’ Chatham House experts note in a forthcoming July 2021 research paper. The primary objective of the US, UK, and EU was to secure vaccines for their own populations. ‘There was therefore always an inevitable tension, even contradiction, between the expressions of support for equitable global access by governments and their simultaneous pursuit of bilateral deals for domestic populations’, the paper notes.

One example spoke volumes. French president Emmanuel Macron and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen toyed with the idea of circumventing COVAX by donating directly – with supplies labelled ‘Team Europe’ alongside colour-coded maps to track the destinations of vaccines from rival producers. In the UK, Boris Johnson was reported to have wanted the AstraZeneca vaccine, developed in conjunction with Oxford University, to be labelled with Union Jacks. Compassion wrapped up in a logo. Why bother with a centralized distribution network when you can earn plaudits for ostentatious generosity?

Considerations such as these formed the backdrop for the G7 summit in mid-June. For the first time since the pandemic started, leaders of the richest nations gathered by a Cornish beach to discuss COVID-19, climate change – and the rise of China. Their deliberations were not helped by a renewed bout of in-fighting between the UK and the EU. Biden used the meeting to frame geopolitics as a contest between democracies and autocrats and called for a Western infrastructure alternative to China’s Belt and Road.

The final decision – to provide fewer than the one billion vaccines that had been trailed beforehand, with no mechanism for delivery and with a vague deadline – was denounced by experts and activists. Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister who had been one of the most active lobbyists for radical action, called it an ‘unforgivable moral failure’.

China and Russia lost no time in denouncing both the tough tone of the G7 communique towards both countries and the weakness of its vaccine response. A few days after the summit, the US said it was sending 80 vials of vaccine to Trinidad and Tobago, a decision that was mocked in the Chinese media. ‘Would this be selected for the Worst Public Relations Award of the Year?’ the official Xinhua news agency asked in a carefully coordinated set of social media posts.

Because of the length and breadth of the G7 closing statement, some useful decisions received less prominence than they otherwise might have done, such as the agreement to establish a Global Health Board that could improve the early-warning system for future pandemics. Few would disagree however with an assessment that the G7 had fallen woefully short, suggesting that this gathering of nations which now constitutes less than half the world’s GDP is losing ever more influence.

The economist and long-time adviser to the UN, Jeffrey Sachs, was scathing in his assessment. Describing gatherings such as the one in Cornwall as an anachronism, Sachs argued: ‘The G7 is particularly irrelevant because its leaders don’t deliver on their promises. They like making symbolic statements, not solving problems. Worse, they give the appearance of solving global problems, while really leaving them to fester. This year’s summit was no different.’

Will the G20 meeting in Rome at the end of October, with its wider representation, do any better? More nations and more political systems will be represented. That is an opportunity to do business face-to-face. It is also opportunity for more grandstanding between systemic rivals.

Poorer nations and power

Even at the height of Cold War tensions, the US and Russia were part of a global coalition to eradicate smallpox. Yet with COVID-19, big-power collaboration has been virtually non-existent, with little prospect for improvement.

Biden’s instruction to his intelligence to ‘redouble’ their efforts and identify a ‘definitive conclusion’ within 90 days on how the virus was first transmitted in humans has enraged the Chinese government.

In February, when urging rich nations to agree a target of sending five per cent of vaccines to poorer ones – something they are as far away as ever from achieving – Macron said: ‘It is an unprecedented acceleration of global inequality and it is politically unsustainable too because it’s paving the way for a war of influence over vaccines. You can see the Chinese strategy, and the Russian strategy too’. In other words, competition should be the key driver.

The question now is: have the US and its allies left it too late? The poorest countries hit hardest in the last few months may well remember the fact that America was planning to inoculate its children while the elderly and frail and key workers in Africa and Latin America were dying.

Those countries who were helped out at their time of most need may retain a residual sense of affinity, perhaps obligation, towards China and Russia. Chatham House’s Yu Jie quotes a Chinese proverb: ‘You always offer the burning coals at times of heaviest snow’.

Perhaps with this in mind, American officials insist that they are not trying to pressurise countries to make a zero-sum choice, on health or broader partnerships. As Blinken told a NATO meeting in March: ‘The United States won’t force allies into an ‘us-or-them’ choice with China’.

Several Chatham House experts argue that if the US and its allies act quickly and deftly, they may be able to repair some of the damage. ‘Helping developing countries to vaccinate their populations represents a tremendous opportunity for the West to make up lost ground,’ Yates argues. ‘Not only will this potentially win over wavering non-aligned nations; it will accelerate the end of the pandemic and bring disproportionate benefits to their own economies as the world economy recovers.’

Vines says of Africa: ‘There is plenty of room left for the Americans to re-engage and be involved. This is also where the EU has a role.’ He adds: ‘African countries like choice.’

Perhaps developing countries can make a virtue of this unrelenting soft-power rivalry. Imagine a situation in which production increases and the competing powers vie to entice recipient countries. They would compete against each on the efficacy and reliability of vaccines, on cost and terms – and on geo-strategic allegiances.

‘Is it the end of the world if America, China and the others compete to ensure vaccinations?’ asks Chatham House chair Jim O’Neill, who has been on a number of inter-governmental preparatory groups for the G7 and G20.

This is not as it should be. In a perfect world, multilateral and cooperation would be the guiding principles. And where such collaboration exists, it should be promoted and pursued. But this crisis has shown the world at its most imperfect. If rivalry has to prevail, it can be turned around to the advantage of those who most need assistance.

John Kampfner has recently become a Consulting Fellow at Chatham House and has written the first in a three-part series on competitive rivalries in an era of global crisis. The first report, on the Covid pandemic, was published on 30 June. He is also a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.

John established the Creative Industries Federation to much acclaim in 2014, providing a single voice for the UK’s creative sector. For eight years he was founder Chair of Turner Contemporary, one of the country’s most successful art galleries. He is now Chair of the House of Illustration. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate for his services to the arts by Bath Spa University in 2019.

For four years running he was named one of the most influential Londoners in the Evening Standard Progress 1000 survey. Fluent in German and Russian, he regularly speaks at political conferences and cultural festivals around the world.

To read the full commentary from Chatham House, please click here.

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Bodog Poker|Welcome Bonus_vaccines for supply to

Johnny Morris — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 20:54:51 +0000

COVID-19 has changed the workplace as we have known it. While the physical space still exists, the overall idea of what a workplace is and what it is for needs to be reimagined. Organizations must deliberately address the changes wrought by the pandemic and the rapid pace of technological investment to enable remote and flexible work. In particular, organizations must take three key actions.

Embrace the hybrid model. The post-pandemic outcome is clear: a hybrid work model in which part of the workforce works outside of the traditional office for part of the time. The more important question: Which portion of the workforce needs to be present in the office, and when, and for what reason?

Employees are craving clarity about what is coming next in terms of work arrangements. It falls on organizational leaders to chart the path for managers and employees. Transparent and frequent communication, with managers playing a key role, can help ensure that the organization moves in unison.

In a recent survey, we found that organizations that articulated more specific policies and approaches for the future workplace have seen employee well-being and productivity rise. More specifically, organizations that have clearly communicated post-COVID-19 work arrangements have seen a two-fold increase to employee-reported feelings of support, a three-fold increase to feelings of inclusion, and an almost five-fold increase to reported feelings of individual productivity. Attempting to force a one-size-fits all solution can have detrimental effects on the workforce, particularly on women, people of lower socio-economic status, and people in less advanced economies.
Reimagine the physical space. The office of the future requires organizations to consider the altered footprint and layout that will emerge from a hybrid work model. Since in-person work will look substantially different, organizations need to make sure that their physical space is in tune with the objectives of the people within it. Pre-pandemic cubicle setups may be a thing of the past, making way for areas of collaboration, innovation, and community-building.

Real-estate footprints of many organizations will also change significantly. Already, we have seen many companies move to new geographies to tap new talent pools. For example, a large technology company recently announced some roles could remain remote indefinitely, allowing them to leverage talent from around the country. Others, such as a large financial company that is planning on having 60 desks per 100 employees, are rethinking their real-estate spend as they move to hybrid working models.
Manage fundamental human needs. The overnight shift to remote work has been one of the most notable real-time social experiments of recent times. It has shown that remote work does not necessarily come at the cost of productivity. In fact, many companies have reported increased productivity. A McKinsey analysis found that more than 20 percent of the workforce could work remotely three to five days a week as effectively as from an office.

However, remote employees complain that it is difficult to feel connected to colleagues and manage work-life boundaries. Some companies are adamant about the value of remote work while also being concerned about its effect on employee well-being. One online retailer, for example, is addressing these concerns and is acquiring over 900,000 square feet of new office space across six U.S. cities. The gradual return of in-person work alongside the newfound importance of virtual workspaces means organizations need to figure out ways to increase connectivity and a sense of belonging, regardless of where employees are.

The relationship between employees and the workplace has changed in ways that require organizations to invest seriously in helping people navigate through their vision for the hybrid workplace and any changes to the physical workspace. Doing so can help employees balance productivity, well-being, and a sense of connection in the evolving future of work.

Marino Mugayar-Baldocchi partners with organizations to provide research-backed expertise on leadership, talent management, learning and development, and future of work topics

Bill Schaninger designs and manages large-scale organizational transformations, strengthening business performance through enhanced culture, values, leadership, and talent systems

Kartik Sharma partners with clients across a variety of sectors on topics regarding analytics-led organizational transformations, with expertise in future of work and talent management to drive lasting impact

To read the original commentary from Mckinsey, please visit here

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Johnny Morris — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 16:12:04 +0000

Since the COVID-19 pandemic was declared in March 2020, the world economy has weathered stop-go rhythms with shutdowns and reopenings, and markets of all shapes and sizes incurring tremendous losses. However, with the arrival of multiple effective vaccines, the world is looking toward recovery, both from an economic and public health perspective.

According to the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook released in April 2021, the global economy is projected to recover in 2021 and 2022 with anticipated GDP growth of 6% and 4.4% respectively. This growth, however, is not projected to be shared equally across countries or industries.

As trade economists, we’d like to offer perspectives about how the economic recovery is progressing.

Economic recovery so far is based on three main factors:

First and foremost is uneven access to vaccines—each economy’s growth hinges on vaccine availability and efficacy.
Second, domestic policies, which vary across countries, significantly impact the pace of economic recovery.
Third, the pace of recovery will also depend on country-specific structural factors, particularly reliance on high-contact sectors, such as tourism.

Furthermore, advanced economies and developing countries vary in their capacities to execute short- and long-term recovery strategies. This has a direct impact on their abilities to recover:

Advanced economies are projected to recover faster than emerging market and developing economies. Advanced economies had the fiscal space at the beginning of the crisis to implement effective stimulus measures, and many now can quickly roll out vaccines. This bloc tends to have larger work-from-home flexibility in conducting business as they generally have higher technology intensity in the production process and digital infrastructure.
Conversely, developing countries historically do not have as much room in their budgets to stimulate their economies, and have not been able to vaccinate their populations as quickly as advanced economies. Lacking access to vaccines effectively places a ceiling on growth, and some estimates project that developing economies will not have widespread access to vaccines for several years. Businesses in developing economies tend to depend more on face-to-face interactions and have fewer work-from-home jobs. In the meantime, developing economies will likely suffer from economic scarring, or long-term effects.

Recoveries also vary largely by country according to the data in May. In particular:

The United States is projected to surpass pre-COVID levels of GDP in 2021 thanks to a rapid vaccine rollout and three rounds of stimulus checks that have kept American consumers spending through the pandemic.
The European Union (EU) is expected to recover to pre-COVID GDP levels a bit later, in mid-2022, due to a slow vaccine rollout and dependency on sectors that rely on human contact and interaction, such as tourism, cultural and creative industries. The EU has struggled with a third wave of COVID-19 infections and new lockdowns.
In contrast, the United Kingdom(UK) is expected to recover faster than the rest of Europe despite having longer lockdowns than many European countries, one of the deadliest outbreaks in 2020, and complications from Brexit. Its early procurement of vaccines and rapid vaccination drive to deliver the first shot to as many people as possible are key to a quicker recovery. Also important is the UK’s quick fiscal policy response; it was the first major economy to set plans to repair the damage to public finances caused by the pandemic.
China has surprised many with the speed of its recovery. The world’s second-largest economy grew 2.3% in 2020—the only major economy to avoid a contraction last year. This growth has continued in 2021 as a rebound in foreign demand has encouraged higher export growth. Partially hit by global chip shortages and international logistics jams, the economy’s strong pandemic bounce-back presents a two-speed track, with strong industrial output and export demand but lagging consumer spending.

Focus on Trade:

As of spring 2021, overall global trade volumes have numerically returned to pre-pandemic levels, but their composition looks different. According to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), global trade began recovering in the third quarter of 2020 and continued through the end of the year. Goods trade led the charge, recovering far more quickly than services. Goods like home office and communications equipment performed remarkably well compared to last year. Services trade, suffering from pandemic-related restrictions as well as consumer hesitation to travel, bottomed out in the second quarter of 2020 and is recovering sluggishly. Travel and tourism is understandably the most impacted services sector (check out NTTO’s dashboard for how this is progressing in the U.S.).

For a U.S. perspective on the recovery in trade, check out ITA’s monthly analysis of U.S. exports, imports, and other vital trade data.

From a global perspective, this crisis will continue to have echo-effects long after the virus is contained. With each passing day we have some more insight into how the virus has affected the global economy. While it is too early to understand the full picture, for now we can see simply that growth has a double ceiling: virus containment and vaccine access. Until the virus is controlled, we will continue on a bumpy, uneven road to recovery.

Brooke Tenison is an International Economist in the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Trade Policy and Analysis; and Susan Xu is an International Economist in the Office of Trade and Economic Policy

To read the original commentary from the International Trade Administration, please visit here

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