Pandemic Analysis I: Global Governance for a Global Pandemic?

S. Niggol Seo

Chapter Chapter 3 in The Economics of Pandemics, 2022, pp 85-114 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract A global pandemic is a globally shared good or experience. It then begs the question of whether a globally coordinated action or treaty should be in place to address it most efficiently. This chapter shows that there is no treaty at the present time to address a global pandemic and only a weak global governance. The World Health Organization (WHO) which is given the authority as a global health organization has only a small fraction of its total budget on health emergencies while its roles during the pandemics given under the International Health Regulations (IHR) are severely limited. During the COVID-19 pandemic, policy responses to the pandemic were being actively initiated by national control centers, that is, influenced little by a global treaty or international cooperation. The rationale for such decentralized and polycentric decisions and actions with urgency can be explained by three salient features: a high possibility of a backstop vaccine, a high degree of excludability, and a disparate impact of the pandemic across the countries. The effective responses to a global pandemic observed during the COVID-19 can be meaningfully compared with the policy responses to other globally shared goods, in particular, global climate challenges.

Keywords: Globally shared good; Pandemic; Global governance; WHO; International Health Regulations; National control centers; Decentralized decisions; Global treaty; Backstop; Excludability; Disparate impacts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-91021-1_3

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030910211

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-91021-1_3

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().