Around the World in Eighty Days: Some Insights for Health Policies from Early Incidence, Fatality, and Recovery Data of Covid-19

Covid-19 is different from previous pandemics in many respects and singularly striking for an exceptionally unique phenomenon. Never before has an infection gone around the world to 216 countries in a short span of eighty days. This paper compares the incidence, fatality and recovery from Covid-19 data to discern patterns, examine differences in approach and draw lessons for health policy and health systems with data of first eighty days from the first infection in each country. The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to compare responses of high income and low income countries from the perspective of spread, control measures, containment, tracing and treatment;second, to examine whether greater societal development or prosperity is associated with better outcomes for recovery of infected patients or lower fatality;and thirdly, to consider institutional differences that may explain differences in outcomes. For the study, we included countries with high infection rates [United States of America (USA), United Kingdom (UK), Italy, China, and Saudi Arabia] and also those with low infection rates (Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and India). We conclude that health systems in high-income countries can learn to be resilient from the experience of other high income countries and also from low-income countries. Timely interventions and administrative initiatives can bring about an enormous difference in outcomes. © 2022 Adani Institute of Infrastructure.

INEQUALITY, POVERTY REDUCTION AND QUALITY OF DEVELOPMENT IN CHINA AND INDIA: LESSONS LEARNED

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) and India attained unprecedented growth and economic development resulting in remarkable poverty reduction and human development in the last three decades but continue to struggle with high-income inequality. These two economies share several common characteristics, prospects and challenges. However, their approaches and trends in growth and development have been distinctly different. This paper examines the differences between the PRC and India in the trends and patterns of development as well as their performance in addressing three major development challenges—namely, quality of growth and development;poverty reduction and income inequality. This topic is particularly relevant with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic which has devasted economies worldwide since January 2020 and will move millions of people below the poverty line. In lieu of this crisis, it is very important to examine if the lessons learned from PRC and India can be useful for other developing economies that are struggling to improve their economic development and quality of growth. Using econometric analyses, this paper explores the determinants of poverty reduction. It also empirically analyzes the relation between income inequality and its major determinants, particularly growth rate of real GDP for the PRC, India and major southeast Asian economies. Copyright © Biswanath Bhattacharyay and Madhurima (Rima) Bhattacharyay.

Farewell to the F-word? Fragmentation of international law in times of the COVID-19 pandemic

The proliferation of international legal regimes, norms, and institutions in the post-Cold War era, known as the 'fragmentation' of international law, has sparked extensive debate among jurists. This debate has evolved as a dialectical process, seeing legal scholarship shifting from grave concern about fragmentation's potentially negative impacts on the international legal order to a more optimistic view of the phenomenon, with recent literature suggesting that the tools needed to contain fragmentation's ill-effects are today all at hand, thus arguing that the time has come 'to bid farewell to the f-word.' Drawing on the COVID-19 crisis as a test case and considering the unresolved problems in existing fragmentation literature that this crisis brings to the fore, this article asks whether such calls have perhaps been premature. Existing works on fragmentation, the article submits, including those bidding farewell to the f-word, have mainly focused on the problems of conflicts between international norms or international institutions, especially conflicts between international courts over competing jurisdictions and interpretations of law. But, as the COVID-19 case – and, particularly, the deficient cooperation marked between the numerous international organizations reacting to the crisis – shows, the fragmentation of the international legal order does not only give rise to the potential consequences of conflicts of norms and clashes between international courts. Fragmentation also gives rise to pressing challenges of coordination when a proactive and cohesive international response is required to address global problems like COVID-19, which cut across multiple international organizations playing critical roles in the creation, administration, and application of international law. By foregrounding cooperation between international organizations as a vital-yet-deficient form of governance under conditions of fragmentation, the article argues, the COVID-19 crisis not only denotes that the time is not yet ripe to bid farewell to the f-word. It further points to the need to expand the fragmentation debate, going beyond its conflict- and court-centred focus, while probing new tools for tackling unsettled problems that arise from the segmentation of international law along sectoral lines. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of University of Toronto Law Journal is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)