Abstract
Pandemic-related public health crises are important challenges of the 21st century. The COVID-19 pandemic healthcare crisis has resulted in international border closures; healthcare supply value-chain disruptions; increased infections, deaths, and coronavirus vaccine production and rollout issues; vaccine inequity and gaps between supply and demand for healthcare goods and services. This chapter aims to focus on the opportunities and challenges for bilateral and multilateral partnerships between Australia and the eight South Asian nations post pandemic to establish mutually beneficial bilateral and multilateral collaboration and partnerships for production of vaccine, research, and education into the healthcare sector. Australia can share its health expertise related to digital health, medicare, medical technologies, production of life-saving vaccines, and access to affordable and accredited quality of healthcare for combined 2 billion people living in South Asia and Australia, which is the key to meeting UNSDGs of good health, well-being for all, economic progress, and prosperity of South Asian nations.
TopIntroduction
This chapter aims to focus on the opportunities and challenges for health sector bilateral and multilateral partnerships between Australia and the eight (8) South Asian nations which are all members of South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. COVID-19 Pandemic related global public health emergency has forced nations to lockdown, essential shopping, social distancing, and closing borders along with restrictions on trade and travel for business and higher education, tourism, and demand supply gaps, resulting in supply chains bottlenecks in all sectors of the economy including health. Nations of the world and the medical scientific community and pharmaceutical companies have put their resources together to discover a vaccine for coronavirus, within a year.
It is now essential to explore how Australia can find new markets for trade, investment, tourism, international education, and business opportunities for its resources, services, manufacturing, and technology sectors in South Asian countries and vice versa. Increasing number of people from South Asian countries and India are choosing Australia for permanent migration, business, education, and tourism (Bhosale, 2018). This has become very apparent since COVID-19 which has impacted negatively on Australian higher education sector, tourism, small and medium businesses and with nearly nine thousand Indians and other South Asian population of Australian citizens, now stranded in South Asian countries due to border closures. Australia benefits from medical human resources like doctors, nurses, specialists physicians, surgeons, and allied healthcare professionals from South Asian countries. Therefore, Australia must engage in a sustainable manner with all South Asian countries and vice-versa to find investment opportunities in health sector related education, employment, innovation and entrepreneurship opportunities in the production and transfer of technology of health-related goods and services. For example, production and supply of life-saving medicines, health technology, medical equipment, digital e-health platforms, public hygiene, including training of medical and allied health human resources, generate health related employment opportunities for the mutual economic benefit, development, and growth in the post-pandemic future, under the SAARC umbrella, which is the key to health, well-being, economic progress, and prosperity of nations.
Australia has been working on strengthening its bilateral relationship with India since it signed negotiations for a Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA) in May 2011.Both the countries have had nine rounds of negotiations, the last one being in September 2015 (Hall, 2015). In April 2017, Mr Turnbull Prime Minister of Australia, visited India to strengthen the two-way strategic cooperation between the two countries for economic growth and knowledge sharing in ten strategic areas (Thakur & Sharma, 2018). This was followed by Australia-India Joint Statement on a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Agreement (AI-JS-CSPA) in June 2020 on thirteen (13) key strategic areas with 49 points. This was a virtual meeting between the prime ministers of the two countries and their cabinet (DFAT, 2020).
The inaugural QUAD ministerial meeting was held in September 2019, followed by historic QUAD video-linked online summit on the 12-March-2021, between, the four heads of democratic nations of Australia, India, USA, and Japan, with the aim to form a strategic cooperation, partnership and coronavirus vaccination alliance for investment, production, and distribution to keep the nations safe, stable, and secure (Sharma, 2021). USA President Biden, expressed it as “practical solutions and concrete results” to global problems, including COVID-19, climate change and cyber security, to have a “free and open Indo-Pacific” region as mentioned by the Japanese prime minister Yoshihide Suga (Ngaibiakching & Pande, 2020; Panda, 2017). Further, with increasing maritime power of China and boundary disputes in the South China sea, East China Sea, Taiwan Strait, Indo-Pacific region and The Bay of Bengal, India is to join a joint navy meeting and exercise between USA, Japan, Australia, and France which was held in April-May 2021, demonstrating multilateral defence and security partnership at sea and commitment to free and open Indo-pacific region (Deccan Herald, 1-April-2021).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Cybersecurity Risk: Measures taken by an organsiation such as banks, hospitals, universities, schools, businesses, governments, and individuals to protect their own computer or computer systems in an organsiation as a whole from internet hackers, malwares, or cyber-attacks.
Multilateral Trade Agreement: Multilateral trade agreement is between many countries or group of countries, who see opportunities to export their goods within the member countries in the group, moving towards liberalising world trade, where countries gain from free trade.
Global Health Crisis: Global health crisis is defined as a health emergency crisis such as an epidemic or a pandemic occurring across international borders, where transmission takes place simultaneously worldwide, affecting many people such as SARS virus, Ebola, and Coronavirus.
Digital Health Technology: Digital health technology also known as e-health technology is convergence of digital technologies and internet with healthcare records and reports, mobile-phones, apps, tablets, and computer vis the internet to improve people’s health and maximise impact. Digital health helps to enhance efficiency in healthcare service delivery for effective and positive healthcare outcomes, providing personalized and precise healthcare plan.
Strategic Partnerships: Strategic partnerships defined as a long-term collaboration between two countries based on either political, economic, health, education, defence, security, trade, and investment factors. For example, India has signed comprehensive strategic partnership with Australia and other 30 countries.
Sustainable Development: Sustainable development is defined as a development activity that uses the scarce economic resources in a sustainable manner to meet the needs of the present people to achieve the United Nations 17- SDGs, without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their needs. That is building an inclusive, sustainable, and resilient future for the people on Earth. The Sustainable Development concept was introduced in 1987 by United Nations and is defined as any economic development programs which is capable to manage and utilise scare resources presently to maintain social, economic, and environmental sustainably to meet the needs of the future generations.
Bilateral Trade Agreement: Bilateral trade agreement is between two countries when they decide to mutually reduce trade barriers, which leads to specialisation and increases allocative and productive efficiency and consumers income. Bilateral trade agreement can also be between two unions such as European Union (EU) and OECD; EU and Balkan Countries; EU and Gulf Cooperation council countries (GCCC) Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.