Vaccine Nationalism? An Incurable Disease Called Hope
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- Published on Friday, 04 December 2020 04:28
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Vaccine Nationalism? An Incurable Disease Called Hope
Vijay Prashad
The total level of global indebtedness now sits at an astronomical $277-trillion, an increase of $15-trillion since 2019. This amount is equivalent to 365% of the global gross domestic product. The debt burden is highest in the poorest countries, where coronavirus defaults have begun; Zambia’s default is the most recent. The various programmes to suspend debt servicing payments – such as the G20 Debt Service Suspension Initiative – and the various programmes of aid – such as through the International Monetary Fund’s COVID-19 Financial Assistance and Debt Relief initiative – are certain to fall short. The G20 package has only... covered 1.66% of debt payments, since it has failed to corral many private and multilateral lenders into its agreements.
The debt burdens are catastrophic for countries that simply do not have the capacity to pay off their obligations, particularly during the coronavirus recession. Last month, UNCTAD’s Stephanie Blankenburg told Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research that “debt write-offs in the most vulnerable developing countries will be inevitable, and everybody recognises this, but the question is on what terms this will happen.”
The IMF urges countries to borrow since interest rates are generally low. But this provokes another important question: what should governments do with the money that they would borrow? What the differential impact of the pandemic has shown us is that countries with a robust public health system – including significant numbers of well-equipped public health workers – have been able to better break the chain of the infection than countries that have cannibalized their public health systems. Since this is a largely recognised fact across the political spectrum, it behooves countries to spend more of the new money on rebuilding their public health systems. But this is not what is happening.
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