This article aims to examine the initial responses and the development of regional policies towards COVID-19 of the two most successful examples of regional organisations: the EU and the ASEAN.
The economic consequences of the lockdowns put in place to try to contain the spread of the coronavirus will stretch well into this century and the way money is created, distributed and spent will, for better or worse, never be the same.
The European Central Bank has ditched a cap on how many bonds it can buy from any single euro zone country, clearing the way for potentially unlimited money-printing as it scales up its response to the coronavirus outbreak.
Authoritarian regimes can use the COVID-19 crisis to improve their international standing, taking advantage of others’ distraction.
The union cooperates well in non-crisis situations, but its complacency, lumbering bureaucracy, and sluggish decision-making processes hamper its ability to respond to urgent developments.
They could have known. They should have prepared. They didn’t listen. It is a crisis with no end in sight. And it is one that Europe’s top leaders failed to see coming.
The era of peak globalisation is over. For those of us not on the front line, clearing the mind and thinking how to live in an altered world is the task at hand.
These reports constitute background material for a comparative report for the project “Coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak in the EU – fundamental rights implications”.
Over all, analysts at Goldman Sachs forecast that earnings of companies in the S&P 500 will decline by 33 percent this year, but then surge by more than 50 percent in 2021.
As Europe has become the epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic, governments on the continent have closed borders and turned inwards, scrambling to curb the outbreak and minimise the economic fallout.
