 So I'd like to welcome everyone to today's webinar, COVID-19 and the developing world. We're excited to see almost 300 people joining us today from all over the world. And I'm very pleased to welcome today's speaker, Jayati Ghosh. Jayati is a world-renowned economist and a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. She's also a commissioner on the INET Sponsored Commission on Global Economic Transformation. And I couldn't think of a better person to speak to the issue at hand today, which is the effect of the pandemic on the developing world. We're looking at an interesting dichotomy whereby some of the worst hit countries in the world in terms of health are some of the richest and there are a number of hypotheses being debated as to why the morbidity and mortality effects of the pandemic have been so much lower at least thus far in the developing world. Nevertheless, the economic impacts have been far more severe in many of these countries where much of the workforce is part of the informal economy and social safety nets are scarce and weak. Just as there has been a recognition that within the U.S. the impacts of the pandemic are not equally distributed, with the heavier burden being borne by poor and minorities, we are seeing analogous issues having to do with global inequality. Jayati has been thinking about how we can address some of these issues and I'm delighted that she can share some of her insights with us today. A few words about the structure of the webinar. After Inet's President Rob Johnson says a few words, Jayati will present for about 25 minutes and we will then open it up for questions. At the bottom of your Zoom screen you'll see a Q&A icon. You can type in your questions there and we will get to as many as we can in the time we have. So with that let me turn it over to Rob. Rob, go ahead. Hello everybody and thank you, Jayati, for joining us here today. As Pia mentioned, you're a very important dimension and commissioner in our Commission on Global Economic Transformation here at Inet and I guess you are also a very vital speaker on podcasts which I can testify to genuinely based on an hour of interaction about 10 days ago which is now posted on our website and is commanding outstanding reviews. So rather than me continuing to talk, I think the highest and best use of my time is to use my ears and listen to your wisdom. Please know that we're very grateful that you joined us here today. Thank you. Thank you so much Rob and Pia and Inet for inviting me to this and giving me a chance to speak and I'm delighted to be able to share a lot of these views with so many people because I don't know how many of you listening out there are from the developing world but I get a sense at least from what I read in a lot of the North and mainstream press that some of these issues aren't really fully understood and there's a perception that because there are many more deaths in Europe and in the United States now that perhaps the rest of the world we're kind of getting off lightly we're not really so damaged by the pandemic but in fact what's happening is that well the developing world is very varied as you know it's they're all kinds of different countries and the pandemic is also playing out differently in these countries as are the economic forces but nonetheless what's really quite interesting is that in most developing countries the pandemic is actually yet to unfold in many of the countries I would say we're really just beginning on that trajectory certainly in India where I am right now the exponential growth of cases is happening now despite the fact that we've had very very severe lockdown now for six weeks and this is true of a number of other countries where many countries locked down well before they even had a single case or certainly a single death and yet now that they're forced to open up is when the cases are rising so in a sense our upward trajectory is beginning now and I don't mean China Southeast Asia where it's a different story but for most of South and West Asia Africa Latin America we are actually in the in the early stages of what may well be quite a disastrous pandemic but what's happened to us is in fact that the economic devastation has been much much greater already and it's that very very sharp distinction between the health emergency and the economic devastation which is very evident in most developing countries so because of the lockdown pretty much across the developing world there was very severe lockdown everybody followed the Wuhan pattern I should say it's not even the whole China pattern because in China they really only locked down the province of Wuhan but all of us have followed the Wuhan pattern some more than others India has got the most stringent draconian lockdown in the world followed by Pakistan and then some other countries like South Africa but in fact that has meant a dramatic impact on economic activity it's a simultaneous cessation of demand and supply which has never really happened before in our economies and so you've stopped everything except for the movement of essential goods in many cases the production of essential goods has also stopped but just the immediate movement and transport has continued but what that has meant is a dramatic decline in employment and livelihoods the ILO estimates that more than 80 percent of global workforce has actually been affected in terms of losing their employment altogether or losing significant part of their livelihoods over this period and most of that 80 percent are in the developing world so in India we know that at least 180 million people have lost their jobs just in the last one month and across the developing world you find the same story there's a huge increase in unemployment and we are talking about countries where there is very little in terms of social security so most of the labor is informal in India 95 in many other countries 80 plus is informal they don't have legal or other kinds of social protection they don't have unemployment insurance they don't have often even access to food and so they are staring not just unemployment in the face but also poverty and hunger and in fact it's these issues which are now in taking centre stage in large parts of the developing world so what do we have we have first of all this shock generated by domestic policy responses still something that is supposed to prevent a public health catastrophe right a pandemic is a terrifying thing and this we know is highly infectious and is more lethal than many other such diseases so that's what we're trying to prevent but in the process we are generating such economic catastrophe to people who were already at the margin of survival that we are unleashing other forms of death and other forms of morbidity because lack of nutrition neglect of other health care and neglect of basic facilities and so on is generating other problems which could even turn out to be worse and longer lasting than one infectious disease so it's not the point that the lockdowns itself are not necessary but perhaps the way that they were done and the lack of protection that has accompanied the lockdowns has meant that we have created across the developing world we have created very significant issues of morbidity and mortality which are not COVID-19 related that's just what we've done internally but of course we are facing massive global headwinds and those have to do with the fact that this is a global lockdown it's not just us developing countries that are doing it so export revenues have collapsed no surprises there the WTO estimates that pretty much the entire world is going to have face declines and exports of up to 30% in the worst case scenario export revenues have collapsed tourism revenues have collapsed and god knows when you will ever get tourism again in the near future remittance incomes have come down very very sharply and that's a very big earner for many developing countries in terms of foreign exchange and then capital flight has added to these rules so many countries were recipients of significant amounts of capital whether in the form of external debt or portfolio capital flows and huge quantities has left in just the last two months more than a hundred billion dollars has left emerging markets and that's huge for these emerging markets because it actually means significant depreciation of the currency and if you have external debt that means it's much harder to service that debt in your own currency and that has added to the debt servicing problems that exist we are actually on the verge I believe of a very major debt crisis and it's interesting now to see how it's playing out in Argentina where the basically the bond holders are playing hardball and saying we will not agree to a very very reasonable restructuring and postponement of the debt payments because it's suggesting that they haven't understood the enormity of the crisis Argentina may have no option but to default but it's not just Argentina there will be many many developing countries who will not choose to default but simply will not be able to pay these debts we are talking about I think nearly two trillion dollars of debt to be repaid by the end of 2020 by the developing world and at the moment there is simply no possible way in which they would be able to repay this so that's one particular issue that is immediately relevant for the developing world but there's also a very interesting aspect of inequality which again is perhaps inadequately understood in the advanced economies and that's the variation in fiscal responses in the United States in Europe in Japan in Canada in Australia you're looking at very large fiscal stimuli now it's true that these very large fiscal stimuli are still not enough to stem this massive increase in unemployment and in the United States there's just been another increase in the numbers recently despite a fiscal stimulus which already is amounting to about 15 percent of GDP in Japan we have a stimulus promise of 21 percent of GDP in many other countries the stimuli range from five percent to two as I said 21 percent and numbers in between so everywhere in advanced economies it's taken for granted that you will meet this unprecedented catastrophe with the very large stimulus this is not the case in the developing world across the developing world other than South Africa which has just announced a 10 percent stimulus every other country is being incredibly modest in its response China has I think at the moment a 3.5 percent response but they also have a very large incentive in terms of the central banks involvement and underwriting various debts and buying up the debts of the provincial governments and so on but most other countries you will find that the stimuli is very very small one percent two percent in India the additional money that has been promised so far is less than 0.5 percent of GDP in other words it's so trivial that it wouldn't count you cannot think of this as any kind of fiscal response to the complete economic collapse that we are witnessing where as I said 180 million people are employed farmers incomes devastated migrants stuck stranded in places unable to get home without work without food for six weeks I mean really major major economic catastrophe and what is the government's fiscal stimulus 0.5 percent of GDP in other developing countries also very very small percent stimuli why is this is it because they're just foolish is it because they don't have the brains to say that they can rely on central bank borrowing to just you know go out there and spend do whatever it takes at this critical point it's essentially because they're terrified of global finance so across the developing world governments are saying we cannot afford to do this because the bond markets will punish us across that and for example in South Africa the deputy finance minister said why don't we just get the central bank directly to the state government rather than indirectly it's a very sensible thing here in the United States you wouldn't even think twice about it because it's happening at every level of government the US Fed is buying up debt in South Africa it was greeted with outcry and he was told to apologize and people are saying well now if the rand depreciates in the currency markets it's going to be your fault in other words everyone is terrified of global finance which is why you would need a major change not just in the mindset but also in financial architecture and in government's ability and willingness to put in place capital controls because the fear is that we've already lost 100 billion you say anything foolish like increasing the fiscal deficit and another 100 billion will be and we will be in deep distress so essentially what I'm saying is that the economic catastrophe in the developing world is one that is hugely related to the way the global system is now constructed and until we do something major to the global system we're not going to be able to deal with this so we need definitely a major issue of SDRs very very large I would say a minimum of one trillion maybe two trillion the IMF had proposed a 500 billion expansion of SDRs issuing of new SDRs it was shot down by the US assisted for of all things by the government of India we can discuss why that happened but that that is what happened we need immediately a moratorium on debt payments and this I would argue is in the creditors interest I think creditors have to really look at the writing on the wall and in fact if they do not impose immediately a moratorium a stamp still and then a significant restructuring they are very likely to unleash a complete a complete tsunami of disorderly default and then we will see a global crisis of the like of which we have not seen or I think it's certainly in my lifetime so the second is to deal with the global debt the third as I mentioned obviously we have to put in place capital controls because without those capital controls governments are going to be fearful of doing the minimum things they need to do to revive their economy and so right now we need a global system which will not just tolerate the capital controls but actively encourage them over this period at least over the next six months to one year until actually things are somehow recovered until things are put in place so that developing countries can begin to come out of this deep economic trap otherwise what's going to happen I would I mean of course nobody knows that we don't know how long this will last we don't know how extensive it will be we don't know how long the virus itself will continue to dominate our lives in the way that it is at the moment but what we do know is that even with what has happened so far unless massive countermeasures are not taken we are headed for a prolonged economic depression and that's not just the developing world this is not something again it's like the virus that the North cannot think that we can do this without them this such a prolonged economic depression will necessarily have a fall out on the entire global economy and it will have I would argue major social political and other implications we would also have a massive increase in inequality in an already unequal world global inequality of course I just talked about it but within our countries major inequality I think in many of the developing countries it's not just that we've got this disease operating in an unequal economy and society but that the class character of the government's response has been so blatant in India for example it has been evident that you know the the anti worker nature of the response the unwillingness to provide even the most minimal dignity human rights and social protection to the entire working class including peasants and migrant workers and so on and the relative protection of the middle classes in the elites the impact on health and here I really want to emphasize this again because I think it's lost all the time in this process of being obsessed by covid which no doubt is a major problem we are ignoring not just in India across the developing world we are ignoring major health problems reproductive health has been really sidelined women are increasingly being forced to deliver at home they're not being given anti-native checkups not being able to access the right medicines or nutrition children with various kinds of diseases are not being treated elderly people with disorders are not being treated mental health concerns have been entirely sidelined we have really added to morbidity and we have deprived a large number of people of basic health services because of the single-minded obsession with covid we even have terrible stories of many many people in India for example dying of tuberculosis which was the largest killer in India until this came along and we also have across the developing world a postponement of essential treatment for cancer patients so all of these I think are important concerns which somehow we we are so obsessed with the covid-19 thing that we forget that there are these other health problems that haven't gone away and we are not giving either enough attention or enough resources to these diseases as well the food crisis we don't realize that covid-19 has not just affected the ability of people to buy food it's also affected the ability to supply food in many parts of the world especially in in some countries in developing Africa and so on we were already we had about 24 countries facing severe food crisis according to the FAO 128 million people already and the FAO now estimates that that could be 183 million people are at risk of extreme food emergency and then you have a situation where the lockdowns are basically stopping you from being able to produce in many cases or to harvest or to get the produce to market or to process it properly or to transport it to where you need to so it's a combination of the production and the distribution and the access for people which is really creating a major food crisis in many many countries some of it self-inflicted as in India but in some other countries really because of the very nature of the lockdowns and how they have been responded to finally you know I mentioned inequalities but one of the things that has happened with this is that it has created or intensified the existing inequalities not just of gender which is a very big one we know that across the world there's an increase in home-based violence against women because of the lockdown and because of the frustration felt at loss of livelihood and because you're stuck at home anyway and so you have to take that anger out on someone there's been there is likely to be a further loss of jobs for women because we also know that where there are fewer jobs women get rationed out of those so after this final is over after the pandemic has been dealt with in that period of very few jobs available you will actually have fewer jobs even fewer jobs available for women including educated women so what can we do about all of this we have to first of all immediately as I mentioned in terms of the international architecture do these three three or four things we have to increase SDRs we have to do debt relief we have to put capital controls all of which are critical to enable adequate fiscal responses in developing countries and those fiscal responses have got to also be oriented towards reducing inequality and ensuring that people workers can actually somehow begin to pick themselves up it's small and medium and micro enterprises can recover from what could otherwise be a permanently devastating blow and all of this costs money you can't do this without fiscal spending but these are the short-term and immediate measures I think it's important also now to be thinking of what kind of post-COVID economies we want to see because you know these crises there are all these cliches about you can't waste a good crisis and all that but I think you know what is definitely true is that we are going to wake up to a different world it cannot be and will not be the same world that we took for granted before this thing happened and therefore we have to try and make sure that that different world is a more sustainable one a more equitable one and a more gender just one as well so I would argue if you have to think about it in terms of colors okay the green economy everybody talks about it but I think we really need to recognize that the pandemic was if you like the first course and the main course is is waiting its climate change which is definitely due to hit and has already hit some parts of the world and will create equally devastating global impacts so we have to think of how to deal with this collectively and so we need to orient our patterns of production and consumption and distribution in more sustainable ways in more ecologically acceptable ways and therefore our public investments also have to be oriented in that direction the second I would say it's it's what is called the purple economy the emphasis on care the one thing the pandemic has brought out is how we have underfunded health and how we have under recognized the significance and crucial nature of care work and so I think care work which is dominantly performed by women sometimes paid mostly underpaid and again largely unpaid as well the importance of care work the importance of valuing it the importance of recognizing it remunerating it listening to care workers and understanding their concerns has got to become a very very major part of the economy of the future and that too you can't do without significant public investment in flip and finally if I had to think about color I guess what color would you say red we have to think of more equitable economies we have to actually start taxing the bridge I did say right now you have to just deficit finance you have to just borrow from the central bank and spend right now because there's nothing else to do but eventually someone has to pick up the tap and it has to be the bridge and it has to be large corporations so we have to think of taxing multinationals with the system of unitary taxation that makes sure they can't get away with moving their profits around different jurisdictions to avoid taxes we have to think of wealth taxes that get rid and inheritance taxes that get rid of the obscene inequalities of inherited wealth and accumulated wealth which are now dominating the world and we have to think of income taxes that are progressive at the moment in fact in those countries that have become increasingly regressive so these have to be part of the way in which we will finance these very very large public expenditures that will necessarily be required not just right now but even in the medium term simply to cope with all of these existential challenges that the global economy and developing economies all face okay I think I've possibly gone on for too long maybe I should stop here and we can get some questions and discussion Jayati thank you that was really interesting um that's a really interesting framework actually to think about the different colors we are used to hearing about the green economy but this really does I think take some of the issues that the rest of us have been concerned about even before the crisis in terms of inequality and you know what what it means to have a caring economy um and it gives us a framework within which to think about that so that's something that I'm going to keep with me um moving to questions I guess my first question is when we look at the choice that was made do you as you you named it the Wuhan choice to shut down economies um and it does seem to be making sense in many of the developed countries that are implementing this but it looks like the tradeoffs that you're talking about makes the developing world quite different in terms of what the effects are going to be in terms of the economy and health so how would you see us needing to make a tradeoff differently than the developed countries have in terms of the lockdown that's a very interesting and good question and I think many of us have been thinking about this issue so you say I think there were two things that happened one is that many developing countries including India we did a lockdown uh as the first measure and we did a drastic draconian lockdown we shut down everything okay now that has implication and it also it's your last weapon you kind of played your last card at the very beginning so now that cases are rising now that the disease is spreading in fact you have no option but to reduce those restrictions so India South Africa other countries we are lifting restrictions at a point when the infections are rising which is hardly ideal second is that you know this doesn't take into account the lived realities of work and residence in most of the developing world so this whole idea of social distancing it's a word I hate I much prefer physical distancing with social solidarity but what we've actually got is social distancing but the idea is that you maintain proper distance you wash your hands frequently for 20 seconds with soap and blah blah blah this cannot work in slums where you know one bucket of water is shared between five people and where anyway in those slums there are five to ten people in one room and there are tiny little tenements where there are 20 people in the rooms next to you so what are you talking about in terms of the distancing and what are you talking about in terms of the other measures does it mean that the poor don't deserve to be protected in that way it's only middle classes and those who can afford it who will do all of these measures and keep themselves safe that's how it's playing out in large parts of the developing world so I think this inability to recognize that what could be done in some countries is simply not possible in large parts of the developing world and you have to think of other ways to address this crisis and to deal with it and to prevent infections from rising also in most developed countries there are some social safety needs you have unemployment insurance in fact in the US it's all about how so many people are making claims I wish there were claims that could be made in most of the developing world there are no claims people are just thrown to the wolves in terms of no livelihood no wages no work and if you deprive people indefinitely it began with three weeks then another three weeks now another three weeks if you say six months or two months or whatever however long you will have no income and you will have no food and you will have nothing we will give you nothing and we will prevent you from even going back to your homes where you could be with your own people who perhaps would support you how can you do that you know but that is really what is happening in large parts of the developing world it's been treated as a law and order problem rather than a public health problem so it's been done without sensitivity and as I said it's being done with a very strong class bias so to me this is not an ideal response I think this is a response that has created more problems than it has solved so with respect to that we received a few questions talking about what it's going to look like in a post-covid world how do we deal with the unemployment when we're looking at all the return migration where people are leaving their jobs and moving back to their home in the villages are we going to be able to reverse that what should the government be doing post-covid to address some of these issues that you've talked about well you know I think that during this period of crisis when you're not allowing people to work it is the government's responsibility to provide universal gas transfers because it's not their fault that they can earn a living you have deprived them of that capacity so the government it's incumbent on governments to provide a universal basic income during periods of lockdown even partial lockdown because they are the ones depriving the population of a livelihood subsequently I am a strong believer in works programs and in India for example we have a rural employment guarantee but I would argue that we need works programs in both rural and urban areas not just in India but across the developing world and these would be work programs that are not just oriented to very strong physical labor but that give you a certain number of days of work at a minimum age and for all adults who require it and incorporate anything that improves the quality of life so it can be it could be infrastructure it could be care services it could be things that improve the greening of cities it could be you know various kinds of activities in Kerala they have been they're thinking of things which assist geriatric care and so on you know so there are many many services that we under provide in all our countries so you can think of ways in which you would create employment as an interim measure because you know these are this is effectively a daily way journey but it's an interim measure that at least put some money income into the hands of people with dignity it doesn't make them feel that they're making and then that would generate a multiplier effect and in Minsky's words maybe it would generate a bubbling up of economic activity um we've received quite a few questions about capital controls and what the implications of this are going to be in terms of scaring off capital capital flight do you have any thoughts on that so capital scared already right capital is flying as we speak and capital is you know for too long this has been held up as this bogey that you can't do anything because capital will leave and so as developing countries were encouraged to have open capital accounts and to deregulate their financial status and to allow foreign bond investors in even to their local bond markets and so on we have become now so much in this way of global finance that we're terrified to take even the most minor measure you attempt to do some tax policy and you know oh no capital will flee so you can't do it you attempt to increase fiscal spending at a time like this you don't dare to because capital may flee so in other words you are asking for your economy to be shoved down the tube to actually go deep into this complete collapse because you're terrified that capital may leave but let's face it capital is not going to stay in an economy that's going down the tube so you're going to lose out both ways right put capital controls right now to prevent the volatility do whatever it takes to revive your economies subsequently let's consider it for me it is not self-evident that getting rid of capital controls was a great boon to developing countries because it didn't really benefit us in terms of significant increases in investment rates it exposed us to financial crises and volatility when Ben Bernanke sneezed the rest of the world caught the flu so it didn't really help us in terms of sustained inflows for our own domestic investment and it did such major constraints on our own macroeconomic policies so I don't think that capital deregulation was necessarily very positive from a development point of view if you put in capital controls it basically means you're not allowing a lot of capital that wants to leave to leave right now they'd have to wait for a while maybe when you would then open it up for them they will rush at that point but it is very likely that they will leave anyway as long as your economy keeps declining and if you cannot send to counteract this collapse and demand your economy will keep tanking and so capital will leave anyway. Along similar lines there's a question from Apurva what are your thoughts on how this pandemic is going to play out in today's international trade scenario do you think the breakdown in global supply chains could provide increasing impetus to protectionism? Yeah it's it's very interesting how it's always portrayed in terms of a supply chain or protectionism you know and protectionism is bad right and all of us who stick our noses up at it and it's not a good thing and for sure I think one thing is for sure a lot of global supply chains are definitely already broken there will be much less enthusiasm for a whole range of foreign goods for sure and there will be less enthusiasm for very complicated supply chains that imply picking up things from different ports and then assembling them somewhere else simply because people now realize that a small change in conditions in one country can upset the entire balance and we've seen this in the big economies already there was an interesting report about a gas paper the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences think tank of the Chinese government which basically argued that China must now become much more domestic economy oriented think less about an export orientation it's a large enough economy to actually do much more domestically oriented things across the world people are realizing that dependence on any one country in this case China carries inherent dangers in India we've suddenly woken up to the fact which some of us have been saying for a while that 90% of our bulk drugs come from China so when the crisis hit Wuhan our imports of bulk drugs was affected and and so on and so forth in the US of course Mr Trump is presenting it differently but I would find it hard to believe that even a democratic administration would not reconsider some of the extreme trade dependence that have been encouraged over the past decade along similar lines Kathleen asks how do you think about the rise of nationalism and dictatorships in the post-covid world this is a real fear and I think it's already happening in some cases I mean I hesitate to keep mentioning my own country but across many developing countries we do see the rise of very nationalist authoritarian minded strong men and I say men advisedly they're all men who actually are using this pandemic to further concentrate power in their own hands to centralize to institute extreme methods of surveillance through apps that are supposed to track you on the grounds of preventing disease but actually I used to monitor every aspect of people's lives and exercise further control on them and because fear is a great way of controlling people they're all using fear there are some who have even argued that many of these dictators would be dictators not just welcome this secretly but would like to prolong it certainly they would like to prolong lockdowns it gives populations very very quiet even though of course there are economic losses but unlike let's say in the US or in Brazil where you have these people trying to lift lockdowns they they're quite okay with persisting in them simply because it enables them to consolidate control even more and we are seeing this across the world we're also seeing governments use these to generate the most unpleasant tendencies in society and to feed off those unpleasant tendencies in India we are unique we have managed to give the virus itself a religious overdone we have there have been these attempts to blame the virus on Muslims unthinkable but true but in other countries people are blaming the Chinese they're blaming migrants they're blaming different ethnic groups they're blaming minorities of different kinds in other words it's bringing out various earlier fractures and fissures and it is reinforcing some of the more unpleasant tendencies in society and I regret to say that in many cases governments encourage this because it pushes that particular nationalist agenda we have a few questions about multinational institutions and if we believe that multinational national institutions should be stepping in more do they need to change given that currently they don't seem powerful enough to have coordinated an international response well yes it's not just power it's the fact that they've been pretty awful so far right they haven't done they haven't really played the kind of role they should have played if you look at the charter of the IMF it's quite inspiring it says that the IMF should encourage stable trade with the aim of encouraging employment generation growth development equity blah blah blah it's all the right things right what experience do we have we have an institution that has actually furthered austerity imposed terrible conditions on poor countries that have led to unnecessary death and continued inability to cope with major events the hollowing out of public health institutions a lot of that across developing Africa and in all the countries that have had IMF conditionalities a lot of the blame for that can be laid at the door of the Bretton Woods institution which actively encouraged reduction in public spending on health and then the range of all things so I think it's not just that they have to become more powerful in a truly multilateral way but that they have to change the way they behave they have to change their orientation they have to change the approach they have to change the kinds of conditionalities they impose and they have to focus on enabling recoveries that are sustainable and equitable we have a question from Christopher about India's digital ID system so this is in many ways unique and India does have a platform that potentially could be quite useful in terms of dealing with issues like this is there a way it can use this as a tool to shape its ship support for this Christopher asks if it can be used for direct transfers to start finance for the unbanked yeah that's what they claimed in fact when they brought in this unique identity they called it the Aadhaar they claimed that this is going to enable all of these access to public services and so on it's done very little of that in fact and increasingly what we find is that unfortunately this unique identity which is biometric based has got many many problems for one it's exclusionary because biometrics doesn't work really effectively for very large populations there's about a 10 to 12 percent error term and if you're talking about 1.3 billion people 10 to 12 percent is a lot of people it's about 150 million people so that's already one major issue it's exclusionary because also if you do manual labor your fingerprints can change many times it's found that the machines don't work because we're talking about areas with poor electricity poor connectivity dust you know all kinds of things that affect the ability of the scanner to identify the fingerprint people have been denied their wages people have been denied their food rations people have been denied their access to health because the fingerprint hasn't matched or because some other mistake has prevented them from being able to claim that they are who they are and to access that service so there are problems with this shall we say very glorified use of technology to replace what are ultimately social problems but the other concern with the Aadhaar is that while it doesn't necessarily deliver in terms of ensuring universal access it has become a major tool of monitoring and surveillance so everything has to get linked to Aadhaar and so you know especially the poor if you want any kind of transfer you have to link your bank accounts to Aadhaar you have to link everything all your telephone number and everything to Aadhaar and that enables a degree of monitoring which is extraordinary what is quite interesting is that even though the government already has this Aadhaar which as I said is deeply you know it gives access to huge amounts of information they still insisted on creating another tool the Arogya Setu they call it it's a it's a mobile app which is supposed to track your movements and so people are being forced to download this app onto their phones and apparently once you have this app not only does it track your movements but it tracks everything else about you in other words and you cannot ever delete it so it is tracking your conversations it's tracking who when how long what you say it's tracking who you're watching which websites you're going to put people do it on their phones nowadays and all of this it can do on the grounds that they need to be able to monitor your movements to protect your health this is I don't know you get globally I did not realize it was quite so extreme in India I have a question from Jack Gow with respect to reform to global financial systems and more policy autonomy to developing countries it seems that politics still gets in the way of str allocation even in a crisis like this including the recent veto by India which is baffling what might be a way forward I suppose you know one of the most obvious things that is a minimum condition is that you have to change your precedent in the US sorry because it seems to be that all the most obvious and basic things are just going to get stopped so here's the thing the US is not really interested in having a big str issuance because the US uses its US Federal Reserve swaps to give money to liquidity to the countries that it wants to give to and so they feel that as long as they can do that they will make sure that there's enough liquidity among the major players in the system and those who which those in the developing world whom they wish to promote and they don't really care what happens to the rest now this is a bit like saying if we get a vaccine we're going to use it for our people then we won't give it to anybody else it's not very useful eventually because it comes back to bite you so I feel that this problem this is this matter of the SDR issuance is not going to go away it cannot because we are really I don't think people realize the enormity of the crisis we're facing we're still we haven't really entered that full crisis yet it's still everything is in limbo the economy is anyway closed down in most places nobody realizes the full extent of the damage and nobody realizes the damage to the financial sector that has already been caused to the points that most financial institutions in the world are today unbiased okay once all of that becomes clear I don't think you can just carry on business as usual and tinkering at the HSE you know so I don't think the SDR issue matter has gone away simply because the alternative is such a big blow up just like you know the absence of a dead standstill and doing something about the restructuring and reduction of debt is again something it's not necessarily just from the point of view of the debtors I mean creditors are going to face such an enormous mess that they will be looking for some resolution of this uh Gopala Krishna and us we are witnessing anti-worker labor law changes across developing countries with varied consequences on workers rights and welfare will it really help the economy or be counterproductive in opposed to uh COVID-19 recovery it has never helped the economy all of this talk that you know you need labor market flexibility that's complete bankrupt and in fact there's a lot of research including the very excellent research done by Sarva Storm and others for INED which has shown how all the arguments and research that purported to show that uh increasing the deregulating labor markets meant rising investment and so on this is all nonsense there's absolutely no empirical justification for this so destroying workers rights reducing worker protection has never led to better uh conditions of employment or better levels of employment or more investment no in fact it's usually the other way it's when economies are booming and wages are rising and so on that's when people are encouraged to invest because these are economies that are showing greater demand so the idea that countries have to actually destroy the little labor protection but do exist in the bid to attract capital and that that in turn will be sufficient to attract capital in a way that will increase investment that's complete nonsense in fact in india we just have three state governments announced that they're going to suspend most labor laws for the next three years and they think that by doing that they will attract a lot of japanese investment apparently this is absurd because nobody is going to come into a declining economy and if you have workers who are underpaid in fed poorly housed uh in in terrible health conditions forced to work 72 hours a week which is the proposal under these new regulations that's not going to be very productive and it's not going to help you at all so it's you're unlikely to get more investment in this one final question jayati yeshwant asks what does this mean for the field of economics traditionally economics has been very consumer focused rather than citizen focused um you've talked about um a color coded system do you think we can actually use this to rethink use this crisis to rethink the way we approach economics the way um you know some of the issues that inet has been trying to deal with for the last 10 years absolutely i think this is the right time to do that and even though it might seem right now that you know the political and power balances are such that it you know our voices may not be heard i don't think that this is um something that will continue indefinitely in fact these periods of crisis and we don't know how long they will be we don't know how horrible they will be but even in the worst of them is when we have to start imagining the alternative let's remember that you know uh when uh when canes and everybody started thinking about what eventually became the breton wood system this was in the middle of the world this was when there was no sign in fact that the war would go to end anytime soon and it wasn't even very clear that the allied powers would win but they were nonetheless imagining an alternative now i may not think that that was the best necessarily alternative but nonetheless they had already started imagining it and putting into place various elements that they could then bring out onto the table when the time was right i think we have to be doing that now we have to be thinking in fairly detailed ways about how we want to restructure our economies domestically our production systems our consumption patterns and our global architecture we have to be thinking about those ways and it's very important especially for young people to be getting into thinking about all of those things because it's only now that we can develop those arguments so that we will have them on the table when it emerges that that system the existing system is simply not worth pursuing otherwise you know as ken said we'll all continue to be the slaves of some defunct economists and now the cost of being a slave to those defunct economists is not just that you have a stagnant economy and inequality and all the things that we've been complaining about in the past i think the costs now are existential i think the survival of the species is probably dependent on the fundamental change on that very powerful note jayathe let me um thank you for joining us um you've certainly given us a lot of food for thought and um taught us about um how to think about some of the issues that we're seeing outside of um the developing world so i want to thank you and i want to thank all of you who joined us for this webinar uh i hope you will join us for the next one which is going to be joe stiglitz who is obviously a Nobel prize-winning economist and also the chair of inad's commission so um that's going to be next thursday at uh 12 12 p.m eastern so thank you everyone and thanks again jayathe thank you