Globalisation and COVID-19: Volume 31

The objective of this chapter is to discuss how different techniques in Regional Science and Peace Science and the emerging techniques in Management Science can be used in analysing Disaster Management and Global pandemic with special reference to developing countries. It is necessary for me to first discuss the subjects of Disaster Management, Regional Science, Peace Science and Management Science. The objective of this chapter is to emphasise that the studies of Disaster Management should be more integrated with socioeconomic and geographical factors. The greatest disaster facing the world is the possibility of war, particularly nuclear war, and the preparation of the means of destruction through military spending.

Fighting climate change and COVID, which is currently done at the international level through the use of public goods based on subscriptions, is the case for charitable organisations within states. Such institutions lead to equilibrium situations that are clearly inefficient (not Pareto optimal). They also raise difficult questions of equity between developed, developing and emerging countries: If we want to promote more effective ways of fighting climate change or COVID type epidemics, how can we achieve such important goals at the global level without jeopardising the growth of poorer countries and making them still poorer? We will show that this is actually possible within certain limits. It will require the formation of broad-based climate or COVID coalitions that will be able to influence outsiders and force them to cooperate by sanctioning those who want to take advantage of carbon leakage. Such sanctions could take the form of carbon tariffs and other pressure measures. The result should be a solution that benefits both developed and developing countries while achieving global public goods that are efficient at the same time.

Before the pandemic, World’s public debt was considered excessive, mainly by the standards set by the IMF, the European Union and the euro zone. Today, with the pandemic COVID-19, the world economy is facing an economic crisis that only the public authorities can contain, at least in the short term. In France, the Arthuis Commission is proposing to control public debt and return to debt reduction by the end of this decade. However, the economic stakes go beyond the crisis caused by the pandemic. It is also a question of preparing a different society, one that is less unequal and capable of engaging in sustainable economic development in the face of global warming. The concern is more about the excesses of international financial speculation, growing social inequalities and living conditions on Earth, which threaten the economic and social future of new generations much more than public debt.

This chapter gives an overall description of how Japan has coped with COVID-19 pandemics. Under COVID-19 pandemics, many smaller communities tended to suffer less, or even survive better with small and modest adaptive approaches to transform themselves, than most larger cities and metropolitan regions. The cases of Tottori Prefecture and the town of Chizu are highlighted, and illustrations are made to explain how small and modest adaptive approaches have worked relatively well here. Some reasons have been examined such as good political leadership based on the former lessons learned from the previous coronavirus threats which Tottori Prefecture scarcely avoided in 2009 when South Korea suffered from them. The Town of Chizu has demonstrated well how the previous efforts to adaptively enhance community’s coping capacity called SMART Governance have worked effectively under the new persistent disruptive stressor (PDS), i.e. COVID-10 pandemics.

This chapter has aimed to indicate some new important emerging policy problems, which have characterised the Covid crisis in the European economy during 2020 and then the bounce-back in 2021. The chapter has illustrated an economic theoretical framework focussed on innovation and structural changes, according to a Schumpeterian and evolutionary or neo-institutional approach, which seems more appropriate than the traditional neoclassical and macroeconomic models, as the basis for a ‘new industrial strategy’ in the European Union. The mainstream economic models are static and point-like, as they do not consider the role of time and of space, such as the existence of asymmetric information and external economies and also the interdependence between the companies and the other ‘stakeholders’ in the process of economic development. On the contrary, the theoretical framework of this chapter considers the factors that act on the structural changes according to four different and interdependent dimensions: the final demand, the intermediate productions and also the supply of labour and the endowment of natural resources. Finally, some preliminary indications on the organisation of a new industrial strategy at the European scale are discussed, different from the focus on just the digital and green technologies, as indicated by the NGEU program by the European Commission.

The world is in a cold peace which is peace without being secure. At the heart of the cold peace is the competition between China and the USA. The cold war will not return because the old and new great powers simply are not as powerful as the old duellers at the start of the cold war. Other important powers, like the EU, Japan, and Russia, have significant roles in determining the outcome.

However, the intense competition between China and the USA has dire consequences for the future of humanity. It fuels nationalism and xenophobia and makes them less capable of addressing domestic issues, such as inequality, misinformation, ageing, etc. It also dims the hope for meaningfully tackling global issues like global warming, which requires a global innovation and mass production system to change the fundamental calculation of economic development and climate policies.

Why use an artificial intelligence (AI) system to determine crucial, major changes in a post-COVID-19 world? Globalisation is both a system and a process characterised by complexity, that is, a referential in which heterogeneous agents are constantly interacting. It therefore requires an integral and dynamic approach, and even more so a tool in tune with complexity. That is the case of the AI system Mileva, specifically designed for tackling complexity, highlighting the fabric of its reality, its core issues, and to forecast the probabilities of the different possible evolutions. In this chapter, the authors first briefly describe globalisation with regard to complexity, at the crossroads of computational complexity theory and sociological complexity theory (Edgar Morin). The authors then present the AI system Mileva, its key principles and the main lines of its architecture. Finally, the aforementioned points will be illustrated by two examples of analyses provided by Mileva on the issue of major changes in a post-COVID-19 world: the situation of the international organisations and that of the world of work in relation to health, environment, development, and democracy.

One can always blame that the pandemic has again revealed the weaknesses of our international governance. One can also blame governments for not being able to more quickly draw lessons from the Covid-19 crisis. Nevertheless, despite very different and uncoordinated agendas from various stakeholders involved across the world, we see a first convergence around corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental social and governance (ESG) agendas in the context of increasing climate change and ecological transition global awareness.

Even if their interests are very different by design, global stakeholders share at least the fact that our planet has now reached its limits in terms of resources and their exploitation. Even if some consider that humanity, not to say Humanism, is slow to happen on the global scale, we see the early stages of stronger corporate responsibility of all stakeholders, including and starting with the business sector. Corporate business has positively moved from a ‘greenwashing’ attitude at the end of twentieth century and beginning of the new one, to a more integrated and risks-related corporate responsibility awareness that now appears to be a must have.

The COVID-19 crisis affects issues such as global health, globalisation, the economy, governance and leadership, labour, international cooperation and much more. But more specifically, at least five correlations can be made between the pandemic, on the one hand, and international security, arms control, and the role of the military, on the other hand, and can be considered among lessons for future action: the impact of the pandemic on arms control processes, the priority given to military spending over healthcare and other social needs, the realisation that disease could be used as a weapon, the need to rely more on science, and the superiority of multilateral and coordinated approaches over unilateralism.

Cultural heritage destruction, acts that are carried out by both state and non-state actors, have accompanied violence towards people in all types of wars throughout human history. Used as a means to cause terror and to directly perpetuate harm on a particular group of people, heritage destruction ultimately erases the history of the people and denies them a future at the same time. Heritage destruction, as such, is a topic that is directly relevant for conflict and peace economics. Yet, economics literature on heritage destruction, especially during epochs of violence is scant at best. Presenting some examples of heritage destruction during mass atrocities, this chapter discusses how heritage destruction is related to causes, conduct, and consequences of violence. Doing so illustrates how heritage destruction could be incorporated in extant conflict and peace economics studies and their relevance for post-conflict reconstruction and violence prevention.

The chapter analyses Chinese and Russian hybrid warfare and their strategies. Although still under debate, it is increasingly recognised that both countries integrate and apply hybrid warfare in their strategic thinking. In doing so, they are able to increase their sphere of influence, promote authoritarian regimes and weaken democracies. It is therefore vital that we better understand their strategies in order to identify and bring to light the processes that encourage today’s rise of nationalism and populism, withdrawal from international organisations and an overall distrust in the global institutional order. Approaching the puzzle from current weaknesses in the EU and the United States, the chapter proposes a framework to analyse Chinese and Russian hybrid warfare. The chapter demonstrates that Western liberal democracies are not only unprepared for these new forms of warfare, but appear unwilling to take the necessary measures. In doing so, these countries leave the door open for (further) destabilisation and a risk of increased domestic polarisation.