Covid-19: Is It The End Of Neo-Liberalism?

The inability of private capital to serve public interest stands exposed. The welfare state is back as the key economic actor

- Jinoy Jose P

Pandemics don’t need passports. They travel at will and no one can stop their journey. With globalisation, the reach of pandemics has become wider and wider. History has many examples. The Black Death, arguably the most calamitous pandemic in history with a fatality count of over 200 million, took years to spread across the globe. The plague, which reached Western Europe in 1347, took nearly a year to reach nearby England. Such was the case with most pandemics in the preglobalisation days.

But when air travel became popular and with the advent of rapid globalisation of trade and culture, more people started crisscrossing the globe. The International Civil Aviation Organization tells us that the aviation industry has seen dramatic growth over the past 20 years, with the number of passengers rising from 1.5 billion in 1998 to nearly four billion in 2017, and the number is only going up. By 2037, estimates the International Air Transport Association, some 8.2 billion people will travel by air.

End of globalisation?

A joint estimate by the Brookings Institution and the United Nations says that as people continue to migrate to cities for economic opportunity, the middle class will expand and most of them will travel, particularly within the developing bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC).

This means the trend of people travelling across the globe is here to stay. However, globalisation, as we know it today, has exposed people to dangers its proponents never warned, or even worried, about.