The dredful impact of #Covid-19Pandemic will be in all walks of life. Besides health, morbidity, mortality and social impacts, it will cause tremedous fiscal stress on the economies of all countries.
The depression, sluggishness of all industries; and supply chain issies in the global markets may have multiple implications in livelihood, demand-supply and means gap. Fiscal space of theeconomies will be eaten up by addressing the emergency response to basic needs of the population, and fiscal stimuli based recovery efforts.
Adding to the woes, will be required packages to public and private companies and survival of the SME and informal sectors of economy. The resources and capital in economies would be already depleted in fighting war against the pandemic!
To reassure sustained income and employment generation, country specific measures will have to be taken. Social sector will have to be the top priority of the state,
There may be an opportunity to remedial actions for fixing the lopsided decisions and strategies. By now we all know that the concept of 'cities as engines of growth' has not met the real expectations of of the economies. Unabated migration to cities and coming ip of ghost villages has brought the imbalance in growth. There may have been GDP groeth numbers; but on per capita, it would be a skewed result!
So where do we go from here? Decentralization of everything and development of self-reliance at local levels, at least in emergency situations, may be of key relevance. Globalization overemphasises on 'core-competence' in manufacturing, production and trade. In crisis situations, there may be breaking of supply chain for a variety of reasons.
The low- incremental outputs based infustrial and economic development policy may be a boon for reincarnation of revival of SME's and agro-based local industrialization, with jobs available to migrant workers locally. The resurgence of economic activity will have a multiplier effect on economy.
The hard budget constraints and scarce resources will have to make a balance between the 'austsrity' and 'prosperity' models in economic development and governance strategy, until the restoration of economy to reasonable levels and carry on the hybrid approach for all times, to address the crisis situations like now in future as well.
Innovative models of dealing with the problem will be important, with local adaptations in specifics geographical regions. The focus has to be on 'what suits and meets best' for the national and sub-national governments.
The new answers will emerge through experiene and concerted efforts of appropriate revenue and spending strategy, and perhaps by 'living wiyhin mans', for a decade. On top of economy, will be concers of survival against lethel and bio weapons. Having tasted the consequences, time is ripe to insulate the World collectively, against any misadventures!
