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On 30 January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus an ‗emergency of international concern' and on 11 March, elevated ... »more»f the WHO sphere and may not be assessed properly in the design provided by well-intentioned 'ideal' international policies. WHAT IS THE WAY FORWARD? If a hierarchical global health system presents unintended consequences and predicted risks, unilateralism is far from being the solution. It is hard to imagine that a country, acting alone, would be able to respond effectively to health threats like the COVID-19 in a globalized world. While island states like New Zealand and Cuba can control their borders with increased efficacy, most countries are not islands to secure mitigation successes through isolationism (Fazal 2020) . Additionally, misrepresenting caution in terms of embracing policies drawn abroad with unreceptiveness or unjustified skepticism can have disastrous outcomes. Brazil may be included in this last reactionary category: if the Peruvian authorities rushed to emulate policies applied abroad with little or no adjustment, the Brazilian federal government refused any advice from the international community. (Watson 2020) The administration has never adopted explicitly the Sweden light-touch style (McLaughlin 2020), but also did not embrace the WHO's guidance (Ferigato et al. 2020 ). Under the federal government's erratic behavior, subnational powers had to undertake most measures against the pandemic. However, the lack of coordination in implementing coherent policies may partially explain why the country became the world's worst COVID-19 hot spot as of March 2021 (Roser 2020). A report from the University of Oxford showed that by June 2020, testing in Brazil was infrequent, and staying at home for a full fortnight was exceptional, in both cases even among potentially infected people. And although the WHO's recommendations were not being met, at that time many subnational governments were already starting to relax social distancing rules (Petherick et al. 2020). The contradiction arising from the comparison between the opposite actions of the Peruvian and Brazilian governments, which led both countries to similar calamitous outcomes -(Brazil with 59.2 thousand cases per million people and Peru with 46.5 thousand as of March 30, 2021) (Roser 2021) -may be the key to solve this riddle. The COVID-19 crisis has cast light on the necessary equilibrium between international and domestic orders. States, then, are called to work on this symmetry and build a governance landscape that recognizes health as a global issue (Gostin 2020b) but that strengths systems at the local level, such that nations can tailor the best policies, according to their specificities, to answer to their populations' choices and needs (Paul, Brown and Ridde 2020). It is fair to say that a more robust hierarchized system could potentially offer enhanced standards for preventing, detecting, and responding to infectious disease outbreaks -it has a higher ceiling under perfect conditions. Yet, conditions are never perfect and, besides the grounded skepticism on the efficacy of ‗universal' solutions for problems embedded in local circumstances; other values are at stake, including the right of peoples to self-determination, democracy, and equity. As an illustration, the Institute Lowy classified political systems as democratic and authoritarian and found that on average the latter performed better at containing the spread of COVID-19 (Leng and Lemahieu 2021) -it is assumed that few academics would support increasing authoritarianism to reach effectiveness at managing health crises. At the same time, it might be easy for developed states to promote a hierarchical global order knowing they will be able to make the most of it -the dangers for their sovereignty and ambitions are significantly smaller. However, developing countries are unlikely to receive the same package of costs and benefits. Drawing these elements together, nation-states should not ‗share their sovereignty' with the WHO. Governments have a responsibility to be a cushion between international policies and the domestic order. In Zürn's (2012) reflection, -higher levels of economic openness increase the demand for policies to buffer the less desirable effects of world market integration‖. Similarly, higher levels of multilateralism demand national governments to filter the less desirable effects of international integration. This conclusion applies to a wide range of situations, from foreign aid and investment (with possible imperialist hidden purposes) to health-driven intervention and crisis management. Thus, if the question for the future, as Moon and others perceive, is whether the WHO will be mandated and if states will bestow it with greater hierarchical authority, we hope the answer is, at least in part, negative. Despite the criticism on the fact that the WHO's main function today is not as a directing authority, but as an advisor (Moon forthcoming), it is possible to adopt a more positive interpretation of this conjuncture and advocate exactly for the strengthening of the knowledge-based function. As a fruit of specialization, the WHO possesses singular expertise to provide decisive consultancy and support (Hawkley and Cacioppo 2010) in the health area, whose beneficial effects should not be underestimated. Borrowing the concepts and interpretation by Ravallion, a knowledge institution can serve as a broker that recruits existing knowledge and conveys it to the needy recipients. It can also identify pressing knowledge gaps and sensitive areas of ignorance, then producing information to address such flaws. It might seem too little, but the information in the context of global health, besides its direct effects and positive externalities, can help solve coordination failures stemming from complementarities in the decisions and actions of nation-states. A well-functioning global institution, which can be the WHO, properly structured to solve deficiencies arising from decentralized and fragmented sources of information, can generate economies of scale in knowledge development and reduce free-rider problems. This context is auspicious to produce efficient coordination and incites broader cooperation (Ravallion 2016) . Understandably, the current model may sometimes be seen as miscellanea, but as Boettke (2021) emphasizes, the difference between bureaucratic and democratic administrations is that democracy pushes the decision increasingly down to overlapping competing jurisdictions, while bureaucracy relies mostly on experts immune from people's engagement. Democratic models are by nature messy but responsive to the citizenry. Bureaucracy administration is technical, but when the monopolist expert makes an error, there is no mechanism for correction because the decision is from top to bottom. And this is not a rebellion against experts. They are critically important to the problem-solving process, insofar as within a democratic framework, in which people can govern themselves guided by the information they provide. This system does not require submission and outsourcing of the decision-making; it informs and qualifies the process. Against this background, a way forward is to center the WHO's mandate in developing worldwide mechanisms to make information available and accountability possible, by generating and spreading trustworthy knowledge at the global, country, and regional levels. In this framework, analytical tools and other simple measures could promptly enhance the system, such as: (a) an integrated platform for exchanging epidemiological data between governments (Moon 2017); (b) investment in easing data collection and transparency, making public the main threats countries face and pose; (c) an accredited index of pathogeneses and other risk factors; (d) a catalog of specificities of the populations' habits and immunity, as well as relevant constraints to plans of action. These and other complementary initiatives (e.g. financial mechanisms to incentivize countries to report outbreaks rapidly and political instruments within the United Nations to hold them accountable in case of delay) would allow for a more holistic and preventive approach, which, aligned with technical support and the supply of public goods across borders, will result in better coordination and cooperation, with political costs and risks infinitely lower than a radical hierarchization of the global system. Are these improvements enough to deal with threats of the magnitude of the novel coronavirus? Critics of the current system will probably say they are far from sufficient to equip the WHO for such challenges. Indeed, foreseeing the future is always a controversial business. In any case, a straightforward way to estimate what might happen tomorrow is to look at what happened yesterday. In the last part of this piece, a statistical analysis evaluates how, on average, performed countries during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the levels of trust in the WHO, with which it is possible to discuss the WHO's role as a provider of dependable, but not binding, information. TESTING THE ARGUMENT If the WHO can play a significant role as a provider of relevant information, and this is enough to make an impact in the response against the virus, then countries where the levels of trust in the WHO are high should typically perform better. To test this hypothesis, we estimate the association between the number of cases of COVID-19 (per million people) and the reported popular trust in the WHO in 37 countries -the nations that had information about this parameter 1 in the World Values Survey Wave 7 (2017-2020) (Haerpfer et al. 2020) . All data that has no other source specifically assigned was collected from ‗Our World in Data' (Roser 2021) . The number of cases per country considered the period from the beginning of the pandemic up to January 12, 2021before the start of the vaccinations, which is one more criterion (a decisive one) to differentiate countries and lead to complex results. There is no metric to directly state the level of information a country received from the WHO and how it was relevant to drive decisions in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. To overcome this hurdle, this piece assumes that the popular trust in the WHO can serve as a proxy for the level of the organization's proximity and how its recommendations are circulating in a country. On average, countries where the population presents higher levels of trust in the WHO will be the ones where the organization has greater penetration and conceivable influence. Conversely, to say that policymakers will follow the WHO's guidance in such cases would be an extrapolation, which makes the metric a suitable middle ground to test not the compliance with the WHO's policies, but the informational dimension. Therefore, aware of a series of variations over time and across countries that can impact individual cases, this method still allows for the inferences within the restrained scope of the study, once when individual countries are compared with the overall results, it is possible to assert that there is no distortion in the findings. To that differences between countries with high and low trust in the WHO can be seen even when compared with countries that adopted similar degrees of strictness. Finally, Model 5 adds trust in science (Science) and obedience to the rules (Compliance), 3 to ensure that the coefficient on trust in the WHO is not overestimated by the absence of such elements of human capital. The basic ‗Ordinary Least Squares' (OLS) in the more complete step takes the following form, where the dependent variable Cases of COVID-19 is the outcome, ß i indicates the coefficients for the constant and explanatory independent variable, i stands for the overall control variables, represent the two human capital control variables, and is the standard error: 19 = 0 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 1 + 2 + It needs to be stressed that the purpose of this analysis is not to estimate the effects of the WHO recommendations on the performance of countries that followed its guidelines, which would be in some degree contradictory with the argument that following the guidance without temperaments may lead to harmful outcomes. The underlying hypothesis is that shared resources plus timely, relevant and reliable information, once received and adjusted by each country to tailor its policies or incorporated by the population itself (to some degree, people can follow the WHO's guidance regardless of government actions), is a critical aspect in the answer to health emergencies and should spark higher levels of spontaneous coordination. As a result, better overall performance is expected in comparison to a context of fragmented or inexistent information and a lack of instrumented cooperation. It might be a strong assumption, but it is a reasonable one, which simplifies the analysis and avoids the endeavor to evaluate country by country -in each dimension of the proposed policies over time -something extremely complex and subject to multiple measurement errors. home requirements, face covering, public information campaigns, restrictions on internal movements, and international travel control. 3 Trust in Science: average answer per country when respondents were asked how much they agree with the statement that -Science and technology are making our lives healthier, easier, and more comfortable‖ -1 meant -completely disagree‖ and 10 -completely agree‖ (Question 158); Obedience to the rules: mean answer per country when respondents were asked how essential it is, as a characteristic of democracy, that -people obey their rulers‖-1 meant -not at all an essential characteristic of democracy‖ and 10 meant it definitely is -an essential characteristic of democracy‖ (Question 248). Source: World Values Survey Wave 7 (2017-2020). Table 1 reports the correlations and robust standard errors of the regression of the dependent variable (Cases of COVID-19 per million people in a country) on the mentioned independent variables, by steps. In all models, trust in the WHO had a negative association with the number of cases of COVID-19. And despite the inclusion of the control variables -potential factors that could be hidden in the error term, in that case making the estimation biased -the coefficient kept its strength with statistical significance at any alpha level. Being a levellevel model, but considering that ‗Trust WHO' is reported in a percent scale, each percentage point increase in the trust in the WHO in a country was associated with a decrease, on average, of 455 cases of COVID-19 per million people, all else equal (β = -454.666; Robust SE 113.7331; P = 0.000; 95%CI = -688.0271, -221.3049; R 2 = 0.7104; F = 11.18). This negative correlation is depicted in Figure 1 , perhaps underpinning empirically the WHO's ability to develop and disseminate useful knowledge. An interesting aspect of the graph above is that the observation for the United States, the highlighted dot in the upper center of the graph, presents a high positive residual that is; the United States (US) performs much worse than the model predicted according to the popular level of trust in the WHO in the country. With no intention to assert causality, it is worth remembering that the Trump administration withdrew from the WHO amid the crisis (Gostin 2020b), which may help understand the background of this abnormal result -in terms of deviance from the prediction. From a data analysis perspective, the regression seems to confirm that the popular trust in the WHO is a good proxy for countries' access to information and guidance -the US being an outlier -and suggests that countries that are likely to be more closely tied to the global health network (again, assumed by the higher level of popular trust in the WHO) performed better in the first year of the pandemic, precisely when information was more critical due to the elevated degree of uncertainty regarding all the aspects of the pandemic. The R-squared value of 0.7104 reveals a good model fit. In other words, the independent variables explain 71.04 percent of the variation observed in the dependent variable -the number of cases of COVID-19. There is not a threshold that determines automatically when a regression is good enough, but data from observational studies, such as the present, might be taken as evidence of a useful regression when the R-squared is at least 30 percent (Veaux, Velleman and Bock 2020). A question that arises is whether this finding is not persuasive to grant the WHO the authority it needs to exert a more directive role in global governance. For the WHO does not have the power to sanction states for reporting failures, China lagged to report SARS; Saudi Arabia to report MERS; Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea were slow to report Ebola (Fazal 2020) . Even though most nations benefit from it, the dynamics of open-source anarchy allow states and non-state actors to resist international rules and pose risks to the whole global community. In this train of thought, with more powers, the WHO could perform even better. Numbers, however, need to be complemented by interpretation to become meaningful (Muller 2018) . In the present case, the qualitative analysis introduced in earlier items shows that despite the essential role the WHO plays in the global health governance, which can be improved, a shift towards hierarchization may not augment its positive side (Figure 1 ), but could yet increase substantially the number of occurrences like the Peruvian. The argument for knowledge-based coordination, providing the WHO the ability to allocate resources and inform decisions, but with no hierarchical power, rejects at the same time unilateralism and forced convergence. This conjuncture can be also framed within the Pareto efficiency criterion. If the WHO is equipped to perform well in its role of supporting countries by delivering resources and high levels of reliable and relevant information before and during crises, all parties involved benefit. It is a Pareto improvement because it enhances global health governance without making non-state actors and developing countries worse off (Weimer and Vining 2017). New hierarchical global health governance, in its turn, would alter the existing distribution of costs and benefits, in the best case increasing total welfare, but potentially hitting non-state initiatives and producing losses to developing countries. In this scheme, powerful developed states would likely be in the winner group, while developing countries should naturally be clustered among the losers, which cannot be considered a Pareto improvement -one could say that this is how rich countries find a way to protect themselves against the diseases that come from poor and/or ‗exotic' parts of the world. CONCLUSION There are great political stakes in asserting and, if the case, defining the equilibrium between domestic and international orders, a question that comes to light and seems particularly relevant in the face of a global disease outbreak, but that extends far beyond the health area. The optimal point of international integration raises questions in topics like sovereignty, global security, socioeconomic inequality across countries, and the right and duty to humanitarian intervention, just to mention a few. Striking a balance between respecting the countries self-determination but, at the same time, protecting the interests of the international community is a continuing challenge. The debate galvanized by the spread of the novel coronavirus is representative of this scenario. Many well-intentioned scholars have proposed a more neat and hierarchical global health governance, establishing the WHO as a de jure and de facto director of the system. Even though some of the formulations are somewhat cryptic, by reading between the lines it is possible to assert that the intention is to create an architecture able to bend national states when necessary. This article raises four key points that may (or should) prevent this change to happen. First, the system would be propitious to the imposition of universal policies (one-size-fits-all), with results on the ground that are historically irregular, to say the least. Second, powerful governments politicize multilateral institutions, many of which are vulnerable to political influence. There is no reason to believe that the WHO will be different. Therefore, the intended centralization tends to not be a Pareto improvement, because it will create winners and losers, with developing countries at risk of paying the price of the reform. Third, a more centralized model of global health governance may crowd out important initiatives that today are accomplished by non-state actors. And fourth, the hierarchization of the system may disregard democracies and the fact that, to some extent, the WHO is unidimensional, while governments are multidimensionalthey need to decide based not only on immediate health concerns, but considering a myriad of factors, both in the short and long run. One of the duties of government in a globalized world is to be a cushion between its people and global policies that may not be of interest or appropriate to the country's specificities. This broad criticism does not mean that there are no good arguments for the impetus to change the existing model -the academic concerns are legitimate and the current system does provide fodder for controversies. In sum, the concerns and the call for reform are correct. The solution proposed is deemed to be wrong. Following Pisani-Ferry's (2018) advice, countries should not invest their hopes in audacious schemes of cooperation that may be inefficient. The way forward is to design a sufficient multilateral basis for flexible arrangements and to equip policymakers with a toolkit for decisionmaking on a field-by-field basis. In this sense, as a knowledge and resources provider, the WHO can work in close consultation with national authorities, not as superior, helping them to identify the main problems the country faces and what could be the best solutions. If the point is to improve the WHO's operational capacity and its ability to issue technical guidance and coordinate with countries, then there is still room for strengthening the organization's mandate. But knowledge must drive its role, not hierarchical power. prevent omitted factors, control variables were included after the first estimation. Model 2 inserts Human Development Index (HDI) and Gini to control for economic and socioeconomic variations across countries, which could lead states with similar policies to different results. Model 3 includes the percent of the population aged 65 and above (Aged Pop) and population density (Pop Density), two parameters that are considered important to the effects and spread of the disease (Rocklöv and Sjödin 2020) and the number of cases effectively reported (Sjödin et al. 2020). Model 4 controls for government stringency, 2 according to the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (Hale et al. 2021), and tests for coronavirus per thousand of population, such Figure 1 : 1 Trust in the WHO and Case of Coronavirus (Feb/2020 -Jan/2021) Table 1 : 1 Results of OLS Regressions (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) Trust WHO -609.261 *** -514.188 *** -499.154 *** -416.305 *** -454.666 *** (119.306) (127.552) (130.313) (113.174) (113.733) HDI 40565.679 21732.210 -1.24e+04 -2269.826 (20856.591) (36437.121) (28150.790) (30181.750) Gini 461.788 501.259 576.932 912.781 * (301.720) (282.398) (306.605) (342.450) Aged Pop 324.260 877.401 * 929.673 * (449.420) (401.721) (400.740) Pop Density -5.329 -4.710 -8.007 (7.630) (4.230) (4.429) Stringency 524.842 ** 561.233 ** (145.697) (155.209) Tests 22.770 21.266 (11.928) (10.397) Science 7694.414 * (2830.062) Compliance -363.508 (1980.095) N 37 37 37 37 37 R 2 0.374 0.473 0.484 0.670 0.710 Note: Robust standard errors in parentheses * p< 0.05, ** p< 0.01, *** p< 0.001 Egypt, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Macau, Puerto Rico, and Taiwan were excluded due to the lack of data in the additional variables described ahead.2 The index sets value between 0 and 100 for each country, considering ten metrics: school closures, workplace closures, cancellation of public events, and restrictions on public gatherings, closures of public transport, stay-at- Do Government Grants to Private Charities Crowd Out Giving or Fund-raising? 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