 to start also with, oh no the recording has already started, yes perfect. Hello everybody, to today's webinar my name is Tobias Brands, I'm a lecturer in economics and member of the CISD. I teach on several courses and couldn't be in the online program of global cooperation and policy. So what I wanted to today is to have a bit of an overview of, give a bit of an overview about the way in which not just the COVID-19 crisis but in general how the current situation affects both all you know corporations as well as households and the kind of government responses that can or has happened and the ones that can happen. So more or less I will speak about, you know give a brief introduction about three crises that I identify, I'll get to that in a little bit, then I'll start and then I continue with taking stocks, so where have we been, all in terms of where have corporations been, what have household experience leading up to this current crisis and what have government responses or government policies largely looked like so far. So this is the first bit that I want to look at and then the second part we'll look at the COVID-19 impact more or less, where are we now, so what are corporations experiencing, what are households going through and what have been sort of the first government responses and then to conclude some policy implications and think about where are we going right, so where have we been, where are we now and where are we going. I will I don't have a PowerPoint presentation if you wish you know you can you can now see me and it might be a bit more engaging, I'll share some graphs every now and then with you guys and if at any point you want to to speak or ask something there is the little button on your lower hand side that you can raise your hand that gives me a notification and I'll finish the point that I'm making and then give the word to you if you at any point want to ask anything or want a clarification from me, all right great so without further ado then I would just start by giving a few in a brief introduction so I would think or I would identify three major crisis that are quite inherently interdependently connected and oh and also something that I wanted to tell you I will speak for about half an hour maybe 40 minutes let's see and then we of course have time for a discussion either in the chat box that you can access on your right hand side or we can you know with if there's any questions or any comments afterwards then we have time to discuss them okay so as I said I would identify three interdependently connected crises the first and the most obvious one is of course the health crisis that has been triggered by the outbreak of the global pandemic COVID-19 right the second crisis that is is the economic crisis which is unprecedented and the likely to be the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s and last but not least the third crisis that has been now put to display more ever before is a crisis of racism that we have been living through and not just in our systems of law enforcement that are more evident with the murder of black and minority ethnic people at the hands of the police but also a racist crisis that is within our global system of economic organization I will also talk about how they are interconnected and then draw back and on the three different units of analysis corporation households and government policies onto all of these three different crises right so how is the health crisis connected to the economic crisis well first of course in terms of countries having to shut down their economies to slow down the spread of the virus has affected the economy because production has all that ceased so by the multiple vectors through which the health crisis has disproportionately affected the poor and disproportionately affected black minority ethnic groups in the global north and ethnic minorities in the global south and also a casualized worker that we used to call low skilled you know low skilled and employed now rebranded as essential workers and the masses of informal workers in the global south that don't have access to safety net social services are arguably the worst off from the south crisis as well as in terms of their economic perspective to coming out of this crisis or living through this crisis indeed the racist crisis has been dominant a dominant feature of economic organization since colonial times when european whites use the racialized and gendered workforce to extract surpluses in but that is also very intimately connected to the earlier two points that are made that are made since both health impacts as well as the brand of economic of the economic crisis is most of mostly felt by black minority ethnic communities in the global north and minority ethnic groups in the global south so this is where this interconnecting these these crises are interconnecting and in light of this and and the challenges all of these three crises pose to our society the economy the organization of countries of multinational organizations of firms i want to focus on three categories within economic thinking so one is the corporation the firm particularly i want to look at multinational enterprises and international financial capital secondly i want to look at household and more labor workers more generally and third and also very important on on government and policies right and so let's start with taking stock of where we have been coming into this crisis where was where we're corporations to start with right so ever since the 1980s growth particularly in the global north and we when we talk about the global north we mean the united states the united kingdom and the european countries but also australia and oceania more generally so growth in the global north is since the 80s has been largely stagnant with barely any year recording much above three percent gdp increases and that is particularly visible even more so since 2000s when when when this is the year 2000 when growth has been largely stagnant and as part of this ongoing systemic failure to spur economic growth corporate profits were of course also falling and accentuated by the oil crisis of the 1970s multiple economic crises of the 1980s and 90s and then the burst of the dot com bubble at the beginning of the 2000s firms saw their profits decrease particularly the profits in the manufacturing sector however rather than thinking about public policy solution to reverse some of the near-level reforms that i would argue largely responsible for these developments what we saw is and a massive and drastic reorganization of firm structures and rather than thinking about how to invest in research and development how to achieve high productivity growth meaning how much output per worker can be generated that that's what we what we call this productivity growth so rather than thinking about how to achieve that a lot of firms restructure their organizations to think about how can we achieve the highest profits through financial means so through this financial speculation and investment into financial mechanisms and financial vehicles right so a lot of the non-bank firms so those those firms that traditionally have nothing nothing to do with finance other than accessing finance to reinvest in the real economy to achieve growth and productivity growth and they started to massively invest in in financial vehicles so this is what we call financialization of the economy which is very omnipresent feature if you will of the global economy since the 1980s which has largely led to a decrease in manufacturing profits while financial profits searched so finance traditionally in the traditional sense of the word and and how it has been as well as used throughout the 20th century in achieving growth which was largely one that facilitated investments it became finance became an end goal in and of itself so we can appreciate this financialization of the economy and what it did to to to to um profits all right this is a very low quality image but you can you can still see that this is the US economy where we see we see especially following the 1980s a massive drop in manufacturing sector size as a percentage of GDP whereas finance insurance real estate rental leasing surpassed the sector size as a percentage of GDP and this is an interesting development on several fronts um particularly the fact that that finance in itself does not contribute to anything that is real to any product rather than a financial product is not is not nothing really tangible that that would make an economy more productive and necessary so there are there are clear problems related to this financialization to which I get to throughout today's lecture as well so this shift towards the financialized system of organizational firms was particularly evident in countries of the global north with the US and the UK as the leading country in this respect both the US-american as well as the British corporation increased their financial activities at home while also starting to outsource and reorganize their manufacturing uh parts so more and more was outsourced to countries of the global south that became integrated in what is known as global value chains and I'm sure some of not all of you have heard of this term before uh yeah but um the participation of countries in this in these global value chain generally represented a chance for but particularly for countries in the global south to move up their value and productivity level however the way in which national enterprises in coordination with domestic elites from those host countries in the global south organize this integration of these countries into the lower end of global value chains this has had rather disappointing results I would argue because they largely failed to achieve what we would call positive spillovers so if a multinational organization multinational enterprise would would come in into the country of the global south what would lead to an increase in productivity and to moving up the value level would be so-called forward or backward linkages that this multinational enterprise would achieve with domestic companies right but this is largely something that didn't happen because multinational enterprises largely focused on extracting cheap labor as well as cheap resources from those countries leading to some economists such as Suvandi who calls this move she calls it a new economic imperialism so reinforcing a sort of uneven development between the global north and the global south through the mechanisms of global value chains and global corporations and part of this move away from production towards financialization and the trends to outsource more and more of the production process two countries of the global south where cheap labor is abundant and cheap resources are readily available also meant now that in the health crisis the capacity of of countries in the global of global north such as the US and the UK most prominently largely failed in their provision of of of protective gear of ventilators because there's no capacity in in the UK in the US to actually produce these ventilators because they are produced in china or in other places and so this substantially hindered or slowed down apt responses of the government but i get to that also later right and we see them though the worst rates of infection and deaths particularly in the united states and the united kingdom what did these developments mean for households and particularly for workers or labor both in the global north as well as the global south so where have we been with households this would be the next point so the the shift towards a more financialized system of accumulation meant that productivity rates in the manufacturing sector stagnated and what usually happened as well throughout the golden age of capitalism in 50 60s and 70s with productivity rising meaning output per worker output per hour would increase meaning a worker would get more and more valuable to a corporation and that translated into higher wages right this is this has been the case for the throughout the 20th century but with this financialization and the outsourcing of productivity of manufacturing we saw a stagnation in wages throughout the global north particularly and a good example is my country of origin with it which is Germany Germany is one of the countries that has most successfully if you will suppressed wages to maintain international competitiveness with their exports but yeah in general the shift towards a more service-based economy like in the UK we saw average wages stagnate or even decrease in real terms meaning while inflation continued to increase it increased and wages increased less than inflation to some extent real wages stagnated or in some cases even decreased that meant on one hand we see more and more working poor in countries of the global north as well as the global south but also a lot of people taking on second and third jobs to to be able to make their ends and then afford rent food or basic supplies so but at the same time as I said inflation increased so the price of living the price of consumption all of these indexes continue to increase while wages relative were relatively stagnant meaning households had to start in debt themselves so had to start when much more think about we need to access credit and in debt ourselves in order to finance our living right and this trend of financialization because households had to become integrated into a financial market if you will because of their their their need to access credit through the financial market meant that this financialization also translated into a massive increase of household debt in throughout the global north particularly but also in other countries so this is one of the most prominent features of of financialization if we look at this graph that I put up now we see that Great Britain has about 90 percent of household debt as a percentage of GDP similar numbers in the United States Germany France Singapore Japan all around 50 percent but in Canada even above 100 percent so there's higher debt rates on households and in total a higher debt than overall GDP which is very worrying very very disconcerting particularly in as this current crisis shapes up to be the worst in in two generations right so this is one of the things where households have been they have increased their their debt their private debt which on one hand of course made the these households very vulnerable to changes in the financial sector for or even if if there's an increase in interest rates from the Bank of England or the US Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank that would translate to an increase in the interest rates that households would have to pay on that debt so they made that made them on one hand very vulnerable but also it increases the overall fragility of the financial sector and the global economy at large why well because what we saw also with the financial crisis and leading up to the financial crisis with the massive influx in mortgage and mortgages that were given out to households that indebted themselves by you know getting mortgages and getting a house etc they're once once prices or interest rates on these mortgage payments increased households had to default on them meaning the financial sector was no longer able to get the liquidity it needed for for survival if you will and this ripple effect then led to the financial crisis so overall private debt is not just serious a serious problem for households themselves but also for the economy in the financial sector more generally right so as a third point where have we been let's talk about government and policies so as part of this near liberal turn in the 1970s and 80s governments across the world implemented far-reaching reforms that mainly saw a radical transformation of economies in form of productization of state-owned enterprises a deregulation of a wide range of sector financial and economic liberalization that would facilitate the movement of capital as well as trade and overall we saw weakening of employment rights of environmental restrictions etc etc however while these policies mainly prominently implemented by Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the United States where they were intended to regenerate growth in the late 1970s and early 80s that largely did not happen more to improve conditions for the population as large as inequality rates since 80s have searched globally and particularly in the more advanced near-level states such the United States and the United Kingdom furthermore this is crucial now going out of this crisis it has left states and governments with a very minimal capacity to intervene into the markets as their power has been rolled back further and further and this has left states with a very minimal capacity to for fiscal stimulus in form of public spending that would invest that would incentivize high GDP growth rates and productivity as I said it's something fiscal stimulus prior public investment was something that was a backbone of the golden age of capitalism in the 40s 50s 60s and early 70s and this was very much dominated by economic thinking that originates from the so-called Austrian school or monetarism and in of course a lot of these terms a lot of these things that I'm bringing up now in the module on international economics that I teach for example we go into depth on where these theories come from what do these theories say so of course this is very interesting for those of you who are who are interested in this topic to then potentially join me in this lecture next year and so this domination of the monetarist school or Austrian school if you will was mainly told governments to think about policy just as in monetary terms so just think about how much money supply can go into the market so how much of the bank of England puts into the market and regulate inflation and that is it the government doesn't really do much else than regulate inflation and let the economy work by the famous Adam Smith's notion of the invisible hand right this was the major shift in the 1970s and 80s away from a more active government policy on fiscal stimulus and yeah this was also very prominent in the in the recovery years of the global financial crisis when governments were mostly concerned with putting money into the market through so-called quantitative easing programs they these programs are created or are are organized by the central banks of the respective countries and to revive economic activity through buying up government bonds and put it on longer term securities from the open market to increase money supply and incentivize spending and investment for for corporations so the idea is if corporate or banks commercial banks can access cheap money from central banks they would give this cheaply into a form of credits to the real sector to firms that then could use this to invest in in in employment and productivity growth however this largely did not happen because a lot of the commercial banks having been in difficulties after the financial crisis and financial difficulties often used this money to balance their own sheets or invest into financial products even further and increasing the discussed financialization of the economy as a result of a crisis that was largely due to the fact that we saw this financialization in the first place another important aspect of quantitative easing programs was that a lot of investors at the UK the US and the the European Union used this cheap credit to invest in non-bank corporations in the global south so they used their their euros their dollars and their pounds to make investments in in companies in the global south so what we saw is a massive influx of of indebtedness of corporations both in the global north because they were but were still not able to access cheap credit as well as in the global south that were accessing this cheap credit but through leveraged financial means and would indebt themselves through that and what we saw since since especially since after the crisis is a massive influx in lending of non-bank borrowers by US dollars euros as well as the yen so if you if you look at this graph that I put up now we see a massive increase of foreign mostly US dollar dominated debt of different countries of course this is not just the global south and emerging economies this is in general the the lending that has been done by by non-bank borrowers in foreign currency so US dollar lending would be done by all corporations that are outside of the United States all foreign lending of euros is done by corporations outside of the eurozone so this is another thing that has taken place of where we've been so to take this retrospective stock of where we were before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic we see that our global economy was largely dominated by by large corporations that concentrated on generating income through financial speculation that those corporations were also highly dependent on the extraction of surplus from cheap labor and resources from the global south and we had a massive influx of household as well as corporate debt as a result of financialization and the stagnation of wages and productivity and we had a political organization of government that prioritized private and financial interests over economic policies that would create conditions for productivity growth and high wages so this is the scenario in which we are beginning of 2020 beginning of this year right and this is where the crisis hits this is where COVID-19 breaks out and March the WHO calls it a global pandemic and everything changes literally everything the way we know our life the way we know our economies the way we know a social organization everything changes right of course there's been a lot of superlatives being thrown around about unprecedented crisis etc etc but I think it is not to underestimate the severity of this crisis for our society so now I'll go through where we are now right corporations households governments let's start with the impact of the pandemic on corporations the global economy as the global economy is more integrated than ever as I said before with in the global value chain and corporations very much depend on the smooth running of these supply chains of trade corridors of just-in-time logistics the pandemic and the lockdown imposed by governments across the world meant three main things first it was a plummeting of production well of course if there is nobody being able to go to the factories nothing can be produced right secondly a complete collapse of demand when there's no income because of people being unemployed or being without or having to to think and reprioritize their spending they won't consume right there's no there's no there's no wages to consume or the the bit of money that's there is not done is not consumed in the way it was before so demand completely collapsed as well as demand more globally and demand for for oil gas and I get to that in a little bit and thirdly there's a complete collapse of supply chains and and on all of these three mechanisms of course reinforce each other and this is why it makes this this this is why it makes this pandemic so extraordinary in terms of its economic crisis because usually in an economic crisis so not a financial crisis just an economic crisis when we have a recession we see a problem of effective demand because wages will go down and employment will go up people won't have income to spend on so demand we have an effective demand problem in an economic crisis right in a financial crisis what we saw in 2007 a we have a supply crisis because corporations are no longer able to access money from financial institutions meaning they will know but language will be to be produced to be producing the same amount of stuff they did before and what we see now in with COVID-19 both of these things happen at once so we have a massive supply and massive demand price right and of course what happens to corporations in that is we and we've seen already the first number is when liquidity problems meaning they can no longer access liquidity turn into solvency problems that they can no longer you know pay their workers or pay their debt and so they have to declare bankruptcy and we already saw first bankruptcy happening throughout the world and as the crisis will go on for quite a bit longer especially the economic implications and as governments are scaling down fiscal support these bankruptcies are likely to become the norm and there's a lot of doom and gloom and I will get to a more positive side afterwards as well so bear with me for corporations in the global south the great the crisis threw open a whole different set of problems so while on one hand of course the demand for their that their products that they produce within the global supply chains but also for commodities right for oil, gas, zinc, nickel, coal etc that a lot of the countries in the global south and particularly Latin America which is my research interest but depend on the production and the export of these commodities and due to the fact that demand for these commodities fell because no longer was there any need for oil because factories were closed there was no need to power these factories with oil that meant oil as as most of you might have heard plummeted below zero dollars per barrel because it became more expensive to store the the crude oil itself then then then actually the income from selling it and this is why it fell below zero so this income stream drives out for corporations of the global south as well as there's no longer access to external finance because for many years as I said before corporations in the global south financed themselves through external finance and external funding through international financial markets as I showed in the graph before right but this of course fell away a lot of the investors that had invested in the global south now started to withdraw massively withdraw capital from these emerging markets in an unprecedented move capital was withdrawn from emerging markets and a lot of them a lot of this capital flight as we would call it went into the US dollar right even the gold lost its value at some point vis-a-vis the US dollar so a lot of the investors went into the US dollar meaning the US dollar appreciated in its value while a lot of the local currencies depreciated making the debt burden that countries have in US dollar overnight even more more powerless than they'd already been before right so this is more or less what we saw happening in the countries of the global south as well as due to the fact that a lot of these countries are focused on integrating their economies you know as a part only into global value chains and not thinking about a product a sort of manufacturing base in its entirety a lot of these countries have now supply bottlenecks because they don't produce manufacturing goods themselves and they rely on on imports of these of these manufacturing goods so there's been a lot of supply bottlenecks happening also with food and medicine in in countries of the global south and that coming back to the point of more of the races and racial the racial workforce and the racist problem in this organization is that all these developments has have accentuated problems of uneven development so there's an increase of unevenness now than there that's before between geographically unevenness between countries of the global north and countries of the global south so this economic new economic imperialism that i that i referred to earlier is seeing very problematic outcomes as part of this crisis so how is this developed by households now i come to household so first in particular in countries of the global south there's a large number of workers that are employed informally or in capital employment with no real access to benefits or any social services or safety nets those workers lost their jobs and a lot of them had to migrate back from the city to rural areas we saw that particularly in the case of india where massive people migrated back from the city to back to the rural areas not just accentuating their economic difficulties because of no more income from their jobs in the city but also exposing themselves and their communities to the virus but of course as well unemployment in the uk is set to double the us has recorded a record unemployment rate of almost 20 of the workforce so this is a massive repercussions for the workforce throughout the global economy what wise it's particularly bad for the global south as well is that while multinational corporations have generated a large amount of profits by extracting surplus labor from this reserve army of cheap labor in the global south they've now left their former employees without much support as these ruptures of global supply chains of course led to a seizure of production for example in Bangladesh's garment industry large multinational companies have stopped any payments and have not offered support and of course in these countries there is not a social service social safety net that they can let those workers to fall back on and given that a lot of these workers are mainly women this and often the sole breadwinners for their family this has accentuated problems of households in the global south in terms of their poverty and even hunger so in fact it is now predicted that for the first time since 1990 global poverty is set to increase rather than continue to decrease so overall poverty will increase most likely for the first time since in 30 years and now getting to the government side and I'll conclude with some policy conclusions and then we'll open it up I hope I hope you can stay on a bit longer given that we finished a bit later so what are the short medium and long run policies for government so interestingly in the first few months of this crisis we saw a major shift in economic thinking even the most fiscal conservative monetarist and Austrian school politician and public servant suddenly turned into a half-baked Keynesianist so all of a sudden it was no longer about austerity and saving and getting getting the balance sheets of the government of public balance sheets right but rather we need to invest sort of fiscal expansionary policies and public stimulus from from policies leading leading to yeah an increase in public spending that of course shows very much very clearly that austerity measures have always been rather political than an economic choice and also concerns over public debt were put aside as central banks stepped in to guarantee public solvency and this is also something that happened in the UK for example the different fiscal measures that were rolled out by by the governments across the world of course that varied significantly but one can generalize that they included funding for social services and health care as a more immediate response tax holidays for businesses and medium in the medium term and loans and direct grants as long-term strategies to support businesses the problem however with these longer-term strategies and that is something I would argue is that that this has put firms and cooperation in a precarious situation coming out of this current crisis why well because they already have problematic debt structures as I as I told you earlier so repayment of these new loans has to be very carefully organized because what you don't want coming out of the crisis like the one we have is that corporations use the access to new funds to to repay old debt or to repay their debt rather than investing into new staff and investing into future production so that's why I would argue and I would follow with with other economists who have argued that that this increase in debtness of corporations that we see now happening because a lot of corporations of course access these new credits and indebted themselves even further this will only delay this crisis temporarily as future repayments will inevitably affect investments and hence growth rates so I would join these economists in calling for the complete cancellation of debt not just for corporations but also for households and to actually get households also not worrying about repaying their debt but actually contributing to economic growth by stimulating demand in the population rather than having the population worry about repaying debt so this is an argument that I would put forward for complete cancellation of private debt which in my view is the most dangerous debt rather than the public debt for countries in the global south of course that don't have access to such fiscal means and support to support businesses the situation is a bit more complicated and external financing has dried up as I said and commodity export have also slowed down they are only left with the choice to applying to special grants from the IMF and the first few weeks indeed of the pandemic over a hundred countries already applied to for emergency financing and debt relief programs so this is more or less the policy choice for governments in the in the global south however there's another worrying trend that now seems to happen more recently and and both here in the united kingdom but also in countries such as south africa that that rather than continuing this fiscal stimulus from the government we see now calls from from the exchequer to re-establish austerity measures to think about we need to save again and this is in my point of view a very dangerous situation given that we are in the midst of the crisis and rather than thinking about scaling back and and prioritizing austerity again I think it would be much more advantages for for the economy to increase public spending and we saw that and for example in Germany that's one of the cases where public spending has now been increased rather than scaled household support of course is also varied substantially but some countries have frozen all payments of bills such as France for example other like the united kingdom was mostly focused on mortgage repayment freezes with little low no support for renters the follow scheme of course was expanded and most vulnerable were supported with increased access to financing however and as I said before household debt is all also likely to increase in this crisis and total private debt is likely to increase and exceed GDP numbers and of course for households in the global south this is different they have to scramble for survival there's no jobs no access to social services no savings no access to credit or or if access to credit and only high interest rates so this is a very disastrous cocktail leading to this increased level of hunger and poverty that I referred to early so just to wrap up what can be done well on one hand on a multilateral level the IMF needs to expand its special drawing rights program and for further support a memorandum on on debt or complete debt cancellation by the G20 states for countries of the global south and here the IMF has been quite active in championing this cause and asking the G20 states to cancel or or put a memorandum on debt payments for countries in the global south on a national level as a more immediate response government of course need to continue supporting businesses by extending loan maturity is deferring taxes providing credit through central bank finance and subsidizing companies to maintain employment but also of course to mitigate the pressures in for households households could be supported by suspending payments of mortgage rent utility bills but also especially in the global south by unconditional cash transfer programs and investing in social services more generally there needs to be a drastic control on capital and capital movement in my opinion because of the way in which capital flight has increased the disaster situation for countries of the global south a continued effort of central banks to buy foreign currency to prevent further depreciation of local currencies which have increased the US dollar dominated debt in countries of the global south so countries in the central banks in the global south need to continue buying foreign currency to stabilize their own currencies then I think there's a need to support businesses beyond the current limited time frame and cancel the debt on corporations and households as I said before and then think about very strategic sectors both in the global south and the global north where governments need to take control and invest largely and that is particularly sectors that are related to new renewable energies and to new technologies to have these as two prime sectors that would take us out of the crisis interestingly as well and that's where I'm going to conclude on in terms of the firm structure I would argue that we need to ban all tradeable shares that is of course a very radical step but tradeable shares were first introduced in 1599 with the creation of these in the company and I would think if we don't ban these tradeable shares we there will be no noticeable difference in the distribution of wealth and power coming out of these current crises so this requires a shift away from a dominance of a very undemocratic organizational structure of mega firms and mega banks that have particularly increased since the 90s since the 2008 crisis but rather that shares should resemble electoral votes and here I am in line with Yanis Varoufakis arguments who argues that that every employee gets one single share in a company that can be neither bought nor sold and that would very much overcome problems related to this shareholder value maximizing ideologies where firms engage in buybacks of shares to boost shareholder value rather than investing in research and development and production so for example like students who receive a library card upon registration the new staff of every company get a single share granting one single vote that can that can be cast in an all shareholder ballot deciding every matter of the corporation from management and planning issues to the distribution of net revenues and bonuses and this more shift toward democratic radically democratic way of organizing firms I think is a very interesting solution that will move us away from a lot of the problems and that got us into these three crises and that defined these three crises that I outlined above so I apologize for the rather longer talk and now I want to give it over to you for any questions or comments that you might have from this talk so thank you very much for your attention and please ask away so Natalia asks hi how can grassroots movement communities and average people help change this outlook yes that's a very good very good point and as I alluded to in the conclusion I think with grassroots movements or with a more grassroots organizational firms that would be that would be a first start that that where a real organization of structures of company structures could happen of course unions have been weakened throughout the last 40 years but that is one good one good way through which more democratic organization of companies can be achieved on another hand what we see of course with grassroots movement rising up against the more racist and racial attacks on on black lives is of course another another way through which this can happen and I think what is interesting what is also interesting in this crisis is that has given a lot of people a perspective on how how much their work and how much their their value has been yeah has been underestimated for such a long time so I think that is something specifically when we think about this essential workers that for so many years have been branded non-skilled how they have become so central to the way in which our economies are still working is is something interesting to see I think and where a lot of a lot of more grassroots movements have been taken place now taking up this this argument for for valuing work more more generally so I would think any other questions I'm also happy you you can also turn on your microphone and talk to me directly if you have any other questions I hope this was uh was understandable for you that you could follow my train of thought um I got interested in bit into in in in in these topics so okay see me is asking I'm wondering one how nonprofits fits into the situation given the unique financial structure uh yeah this is of course another and very interesting aspect so what we see for example with in the UK but also in other countries that a lot of the money and the finance and finance made available for cooperation was not always extended to nonprofits particularly now with the merger of DFID and the foreign office nonprofits that work in for work in the field of aid will have extra difficulties in in in in access to the already difficulties with COVID-19 to access finance for for the direct relief of the of the situation in a lot of the countries in the global south for nonprofits in the global north of course there's also similarly to to other organizations the the problem of survival and here some countries have stepped up um quite a bit to support nonprofit organizations but in general we see a trend uh with um financing away from that on a different note Simi asks how developing economies like African countries may approach the recovery to this crisis especially given how many African countries the infrastructure is already broken yes this is a very very good point and here of course the the question is on how not just what what I just alluded to in terms of this restructuring of of aid from from the global north but also how countries themselves can access finance through the IMF in ways that don't increase their debt patronage so in the past a lot of developing countries in the global south have increased or have accessed finance from the IMF and from the world bank but this was often done with caution conditionality so an important aspect would now be to not put conditionalities on these special drawing rights that should be granted to these countries but rather that these countries use this investment uh in in ways that can enhance productivity for example infrastructure development but also I would argue a lot of the the way in which countries have been uh made so or sort of dependent on on on on aid and investment from abroad is that uh that a lot of these countries have to privatize as part of this conditionality in the 1980s and 90s of the Washington consensus had to privatize their their sectors and their public owned assets so I would argue for a reversal of these privatization reforms that would then give give governments not just sources of income but also available resources that could be invested into into infrastructure how can we go about improving democracy in the workplace Samuel asked that is a very very good question and that is of course something that speaks directly to a unionization of the workplace and and here I would uh you know everybody who is in workplace uh call for uh joining that they would join a union or they would inform themselves what kind of structures are already available in the workplace um and of course uh we need to push for uh from academic thinking but also from grassroots movements and NGOs etc to challenge this anti-union laws that are in place not just in the countries of the global south but also in countries like the united kingdom where market thatcher uh has had in the 1980s implemented various policies that were quite anti-union so here a political shift needs to happen that would um that would allow more more yeah that would allow unionization as well as well as a more yeah more grassroots movements within the union to organize to unionize and to challenge some of their the imbalances of power that exists in in the in the economy so this would be my argument so maitri ji maitri asked in the midst of the pandemic in the global south we see political unrest within the indochina border as well as ban of china produce products within india will this affect the global north in the production chain that's a very good question um and i would i would i would not think directly so because often within these global value chains it isn't really countries that engage with inter firm or uh or direct trade but rather multinationals that take one product and ship it from the from the uh from where the resources are sourced to the assembly of the point which is in a different country to then the final product which is in a different country etc so a lot of those are not registered as as arm makes trade but of course i think what we what we do see with an increased nationalism throughout the world the global economy and the global society with trump as the leading figure in this and the new american to list move to towards more protectionism and political nationalism there of course is serious challenges as well that this creates for the global economy at large and the the the issue here of course is that a lot of people feel the the brunt of of being left out of these of the benefits of the global value chains are now turning towards more nationalist and populist leaders that endanger not just the global economy but but more generally peace throughout the world and china and india are two other good examples both sonaro in in brazil is another example of where this happens quite in a way that is quite disconcerting in addition to all of these issues that are raised simi asks i'm curious about how you think the knowledge from the so-ask global cooperation policy master program may be leveraged into job opportunities doing an after pandemic that's a very good question simi so of course while my talk was quite a critical analysis of the overview you know of what has been going on and what what is going on now how the global corporation the policy master program is very unique in its in its way in which you have a very interdisciplinary access to very interdisciplinary scholars and lectures you you can choose modules that have much more to do with diplomacy if it's something that that you know you're more interested in going into your n or ng or organizations then you can choose a lot of different modules that have to do with policy with diplomacy and move towards more of a of a public servant or ngo career then there of course is the international economics program that is gives you a lot of the tools necessary for analyzing all of the different ways in which economies work so we do a lot of theory we apply a lot of the a lot of those theories to real world events and to firms and case studies of different firms as well as the multinational enterprise module that I also teach we specifically look at more of the business organization side of things and how you could influence efficiency levels in the corporation if that is the path that you want to go down on so given that we have these different pathways there is something for you guaranteed that would help you get a job in during and after the pandemic yeah as Father said the different destination of the program off CSD is available on our website so please also have a look there um but yeah so a lot of them a lot of you guys are leaving I hope that wasn't due to the fact that you weren't interested in the talk but it has been over an hour and of course attention spans and schedules are tight there's no other questions then I thank you very much for your attention if there's any other questions that arise you can always email me I'm going to put the my email address in the chat box so there's any other questions that you might have please feel free to reach out and I hope you enjoyed today and we're educating students about labor loss be helpful well yeah of course of course this is also something Samuel that is that is important and that is part of of of the modules as well about different labor loss especially the multinational enterprises program that looks at economic as well as legal perspective on all the multinational enterprises so yes this is definitely also something that's helpful okay thank you so much for this talk it's been extremely informative well it's recorded yeah there's there's um yeah as as was just stated uh we will send the recording out in the next few days um so you have access to that if there's anything else in terms of sources that you need um also please reach out iran is asking what has been the impact of COVID-19 on military spending that is a good question that I am not able to answer from the top of my head this is not really um something that I follow too closely but um I would think it has affected to some extent but military spending is usually is but particularly from the US in the UK not something that acts as a crisis rather than often within crisis military spending increases due to the fact that there is more insecurity globally about the about the situation um on security issues but I I don't know I would have to have a look at different countries and spending of military in different countries okay I thank you very much for your attention um as I said if there's anything that arises be it something to do with my lecture something to do with uh the course the program please feel free to reach out um and I hope I'll see you in September October when the program start October um and engage more with you um yeah so thank you very much and just yes do that Samuel it's a good idea um okay I'm also going to sign off um you take care everybody stay safe stay healthy thanks thanks to be there yeah it's all right you want me to stay on for a bit further and I think it's cool yeah it's cool that's good thanks well um we will get recording um