Building a New Future Transformative Recovery with Equality and Sustainability coordinated by Alicia Bárcena, with the collaboration of Mario Cimoli – Thirty-eighth session of ECLAC (2020).
“The coronavirus pandemic has generated the largest contraction in GDP and trade worldwide since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Times are highly uncertain, with clarity on neither the route out of the crisis nor the speed at which it may be achieved. The uncertainty is exacerbated by the possibility of fresh outbreaks in Europe and Asia and indeed some countries of the region that have begun to ease lockdowns as their epidemic curves have slowed, together with the fact that many other countries in the region have become major focuses of the virus.
Crisis periods can also be periods of intense learning and major transformation. This is particularly true in the crisis caused by coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which has made the structural problems that have long strained the world economy all the more evident. The pandemic has transformed the chronic issues of global economy’s development pattern into an acute condition requiring an immediate response.
The evolution of the international system was already showing growing imbalances that testified to the unsustainability of the prevailing production, distribution and consumption patterns, as well as their institutional and political underpinnings. The pandemic is battering that structure to such an extent that governments and the international community must inevitably respond with a new sense of urgency. This urgency has led to a pragmatic rethinking of politics and role of the State, freed of the preconceptions and myths that stymied use of the instruments to which a democratic State may legitimately resort. Transforming this momentum into action and emergency responses into a consistent and sustained effort to build a new development pattern, surmounting the imbalances of the one before, is the task that governments, civil society and the international community must undertake in the coming years.
The structural problems facing the world economy occur in three areas, each with their own but interrelated dynamics: slower and more unstable growth of global output and trade, rapidly increasing inequality in the world’s major economies, and environmental destruction and climate change. The pandemic has hastened what most analysts already perceived as a change of era. Especially in the past five years, the global and regional political economy had been undergoing substantial changes…”
