Abstract
The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic is not only dragging the world's economies into recession, but also negatively affecting the UN's sustainable development goals (SDG), which require global cooperation of contemporary states. There are 17 SDGs covering human-nature-society-states relations and government interventions. Each has its own separate goals and means. The common feature of all of them is to provide access to welfare for the people living in the world. The pandemic raises awareness of how vital the SDGs are for the future of humanity and creates opportunities. The subject and purpose of this study is two-part: on the one hand, to reveal the SDGs under the threat of the pandemic and the development of the SDGs before and after the pandemic and the responses to the SDGs by the COVID-19 measures and, on the other hand to examine the short-term political economy scenarios developed about the pandemic that led to the economic crisis.
TopBackground
The political economy literature on the coronavirus pandemic has begun to expand almost as quickly as the virus spread. Below is a symbolic summary of this literature, which may provide a clue as to which gap this study fills.
Weyl and Sethi (2020) state that Covid-19 threatens every aspect of global society and requires the full mobilization of the political economy: Much of the economy must be repurposed, rather than simply supporting or promoting, as in a typical recession. Their joint report then aims to co-ordinate strategies between industrial sectors and lay out the different policies regarding mobilisation.
Bergsen (2020) explains how the pandemic has mandated protectionist state policies: The pandemic has provided an opportunity for an important display of states' ability to implement policy and deliver services while prompting unprecedented measures of economic support from governments in Europe, which has suffered the most after the United States. This, it is argued, raises expectations for a rebalancing between voters-state-market despite some political obstacles.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Political Economy Scenarios: It describes the estimation and analysis of monetary and financial measures that governments can take and their effects in order to turn conjunctures such as contraction and recession expected in the short term (1-3 years) into recovery and expansion in world economies which are entering the pandemic process.
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): The 17-point contingency plan under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, after decades of international scientific forums and political summits. All developed, developing and underdeveloped countries are in global cooperation to achieve these 17-item development goals.
Pandemic: It is the name given by the World Health Organization after the coronavirus disease, which first appeared in China in 2019, was transmitted to the whole world. Covid-19, which caused mass deaths, workforce losses and fear, was initially effective at the regional level, but was named “epidemic” , and when it turned global in a short time, it was named “pandemic”.