There are two main reasons why the novel Coronavirushas been such a disaster for the world economy: One, that it infects everyone — regardless of their economic status, and two, because it essentially spreads just the way economic growth does — via human interaction. In other words, controlling the virus’ spread and limiting the damage on the health side necessarily, by definition, results in incurring economic losses.
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While this was known from day one, this odious trade-off explains why so many governments and populations have been caught napping with more damaging second and third waves.
India is no exception. But, unlike other countries such as China, which controlled the virus much sooner, or the US and the UK, which despite being hit hard by Covid had the financial resources to protect the livelihoods of their people, India has suffered grievously.
Starting April, it was expected that India’s economy will register a fast economic rebound and quickly make up for the losses incurred in 2020. But the massive and unabated surge in Covid cases all across the country, which has exposed the government’s lack of preparation over the past year as grossly inadequate, points to the possibility of a scenario where India may not even be able to make up for the economic (GDP) contraction it suffered in the last financial year (2020-21).
But what does it mean in real terms?
Such a sharp contraction in GDP growth essentially means that millions of people will not only lose part or all of their current incomes but also the means to earn their income. What’s worse, since India’s economy was already decelerating before the pandemic, people do not have the savings to fight for long. Sooner rather than later they will see a sharp worsening in their economic, physical and social wellbeing.
A lot of focus has been on the pitiable state of India’s migrant workforce, but there is an equally primal shriek of desperation being let out by India’s middle class — one which has largely gone unheard.
“Prior to the pandemic, it was anticipated that 99 million people in India would belong in the global middle class in 2020. A year into the pandemic, this number is estimated to be 66 million, cut by a third. Meanwhile, the number of poor in India is projected to have reached 134 million, more than double the 59 million expected prior to the recession,” stated the Pew Research report.
While the fact that 75 million people will be pushed back to abject levels of poverty (of living at less than $2 a day), what is equally, if not more, worrisome is that fact that India’s middle class was reduced by one-third — and that is just the impact of the last year. Given its severity, the current second wave and its economic impact could well mean that India’s middle class will be reduced to half of what it was before the pandemic.
What exactly is the middle class?
Typically economic researchers tend to use income or expenditure (as a proxy for income) to spot the middle class. For instance, in the above case, the poor live on $2 or less daily, low income on $2.01-$10, middle income on $10.01-$20, upper-middle income on $20.01-$50 and high income on more than $50. But it is possible to define the middle class as those whose expenditure ranges between 75% to 125% of the median expenditures.
Further, cash is not the only marker of being middle class.
It is also characterised by certain values, mindsets, educational and occupational choices. For instance, people belonging to the middle-class aim to have decent well-paying jobs or small businesses, hope to own a house of their own, seek to have a secure retirement, and want to secure the healthcare and educational needs of their family. Every generation of a middle-class household hopes that its next-generation would be slightly better off.
Why does the middle-class matter?
Unlike its humble name, the middle class is often considered the glue that keeps modern liberal democratic economies from falling apart under the strain of ever-rising inequalities.
In his 1984, a well-known political economist Lester Thurow said the shrinking of the American middle class was a “cause of concern for the American political democracy”. “What Karl Marx saw as an inevitable revolution was based on the assumption that the economy would eventually generate a bipolar income distribution composed of rich and poor. Once this bipolar situation existed, he said, the poor would revolt, destroy the rich, and establish communism. But Marx’s predicted revolution did not occur because he did not foresee the rise of the middle class. The middle class had an interest in preserving capitalism and voted to alleviate the worst excesses of capitalism with social welfare programs. Their very presence gave the poor hope that they too could escape from poverty,”.
Beyond the political aspect, it is now well established that economic growth is stronger in countries that have a strong middle class. A 2011 Asian Development Bank paper, titled “The Role of the Middle Class in Economic Development: What Do Cross-Country Data Show?” looked at no less than 72 developing countries, including India, to confirm the finding by researchers like Nobel winners Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo and many others that middle class has a salutary impact through various ways. For instance, the middle class is where entrepreneurs that foster innovation and growth emerge. Middle class “values” also encourage the accumulation of human capital (via education) and savings (that can then be used for productive investment in the economy).
Moreover, in comparison to the poor, the middle class has the ability and power to demand better public service delivery and greater accountability from public officials, and support growth-oriented policies.
But the world over, the middle class has been shrinking and this trend is considered worrisome. “Among middle-class households, there is now a growing discontent with economic conditions. In this context, the stagnation of middle-class living standards in OECD countries has been accompanied in recent years by the emergence of new forms of nationalism, isolationism, populism and protectionism.
Nationalistic and anti-globalization sentiments can arise because a shrinking middle class produces disillusionment and damages political engagement, or turns voters towards anti-establishment and protectionist policies. Political instability is an important channel through which a squeezed middle class may upset economic investment and growth,” states a 2019 OECD book, titled “Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle Class”.
In India, all the data pointed to the middle-class coming under severe strain even before the pandemic. Unemployment levels had risen to a 45-year high even as consumption expenditures had fallen sharply (although the latter survey was disowned by the government). Health and nutrition data also showed a significant decline even as educational outcomes continue to lag. National accounts data showed Indians getting more and more indebted since 2017. Further fuelling the middle-class discontent in recent years has been the high retail inflation especially led by heavy taxation on every fuel like petrol and LPG.
It was at this juncture that the Covid pandemic wreaked havoc.
So what can be done to remedy the situation?
The ADB paper concluded that “policies that factor in the welfare of the middle class and nurture their growth may be a more effective long-term strategy for alleviating poverty compared to policies focusing solely on the poor”.
That’s because a growth strategy that includes the middle class is likely to be more sustainable, given that more people across different racial and ethnic groups share in the growth process.
“A politically and economically strong middle class is more likely to hold a government accountable, which would, in turn, ensure the rule of law, protection of property rights, and continued economic reform,” it stated.
More specific to the Indian middle class, the starting point has to be a reordering of the taxation and benefits matrix. In other words, the overall tax burden should be reduced even as the benefits such as public healthcare — which has been exposed to be woefully inadequate — and education are ramped up. Doing this would necessarily require the government to make the tax system more progressive and demand higher taxation from the rich.
Similarly, the government must do everything it can to bring down the cost of living for the middle class. For instance, making housing affordable.
The third big thrust has to be to address the lack of jobs and falling labour force participation rate. In particular, this will require a concerted effort to improve the skills of India’s middle class.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.