 We're joined by, let's see, Dr. Sophie Van Hulen. She's a lecturer in the Department of Economics. And she specializes in international finance, econometrics, and primary commodities. And like a lot of our academics at SOA, she has a background actually working in the field as well. So she's worked as a consultant for the German Federal Ministry of Finance, the African Development Bank, and the UN Conference on Trade and Development. And we're also joined by one of our final year students, So-Yoon. So she'll be available to answer any questions about what it's like to be a student and she'll be available at the end to talk a little bit more about that. So if we are ready, I think I might hand over now to Dr. Hulen to talk about the economic impact of COVID-19, what GDP doesn't tell you. Over to you. Thank you, Tanya. I will share my screen one second. Okay, here we are. Sanya said the economic impact of COVID-19 and we are focused today on measuring this economic impact, leaning a little bit to GDP, which is probably the one measure that is most famous and famously used in order to measure, well, how the economy is doing basically. It's kind of like taking the temperature of the economy to see how well things are going. However, we will put a little bit of a critical perspective on GDP and see how well it actually does capture the economic and also the social impact of COVID-19 and the two things, of course, are being interlinked. So we have a little bit of a debate. No need to introduce her, so Yoon will join me and she's our finalist students in the BA Economics and Politics and she was the end of the session. She also has some time to introduce herself properly to you. So let's start the lecture. The objectives today, probably not in that precise order, but we will first cover what is GDP very briefly because most of you will be familiar with that measure, but we have a little bit of a technical discussion here. Then move into the economic impact of COVID-19 as it's seen through the lens of GDP, then reflect on that measure and see what's actually excluded from that measure and it's also counted as an economic and social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We then look at COVID-19 and two particular lenses, which is gender and inequality, and then again, look at it through the lens of GDP and the critique of GDP and then thinking about what alternative measures are there. That's a brief introduction and hopefully finish with a little bit of a discussion as well. Most of course, about the economics department but hopefully also about the content of this talk. So let me start. These are three different headlines. I actually picked from different news outlets just yesterday. So yesterday's headlines and you can see, so the left one is from the Financial Times which titles UK economy shrinks by the most in 300 years. One in the middle is the Guardian, assessed the UK economy hid by a record slump in 2020 and the one on the right is taken from the BBC which tells you that the UK economy suffered a record annual slump in 2020. So all very similar. They talk about the economy shrinking record slump of the economy. What they kind of do mean by this is they report on a figure that has been announced by the Office for National Statistics which tells you that the GDP in the UK shrank by 9.9% so almost double digits, 10% figure. So while that is not obvious in the headlines and actually that we actually talking about GDP only snacks up in the subtitle of the Guardian what these stories mean when they say the economy shrank is that GDP, so the gross domestic product has shrunk. So that tells you how important GDP is also in evaluating how the economy does. Now what is GDP? GDP in simple or kind of abstract terms the total value of goods and services that is produced in an economy over a given time frame often figures are being announced on a quarterly basis. They frequently revised as of course measurement processes take time or they're being reported on an annual basis. There are three different ways in which GDP can be measured which is called either the expenditure income or production method. And they all by kind of the national accountancy standards they all come up with exactly the same value. Often how GDP is being seen or being perceived it's kind of a measure of the standard of living or well-being or the well-being of the economy as a whole. It's a measure that is being emphasised a lot and seen as of great being of great importance. It's often in or reported in per capita terms which then allows you to compare it across different countries because you divide it by the number of citizens that are resident in that economy. So it gives you a way to compare between large economies and small economies. If GDP increases it's always seen as kind of a growth or improvement in the standard of living. If it decreases, especially if it falls by definition over two successive quarters, then this is seen as a recession. So that's the definition of a recession. However, what we need to keep in mind and that's just a footnote here and not something that we would focus on much but something to keep in mind nevertheless is what goes in and what this outside of GDP so what is being taken as being produced in an economy is as much a political decision as a statistical question. It's not an objective measure at all. It has been changed. So what goes in and what comes out has been changed over time, over history. A couple of times has changed up. So for instance, famously financial services have been excluded for a long time as part of GDP as the financial sector was seen as the unproductive sector. But after a lot of lobbying from the financial sector industry, it has now included as part of the measures of GDP. So as you can see, there's a lot of kind of political decisions as much as statistical ones what is measured as productive element and what is measured as not a productive element. Now, this is a quick look at how GDP has evolved throughout the COVID crisis. This is taken during the first lockdown and looking in at the UK and just to show you the kind of massive and almost unprecedented impact COVID-19 had on the shrinking of the economy as various sectors were being shut down and you see all the red elements are the parts where the economy has shrunk and you can see the ones that kind of some of us might remember some of you might be too young to remember very vividly but the last kind of major shock we had was the global or great financial crisis in 2007, 2008. And now the shrinking of the economy over COVID-19 has kind of exceeded that value by five times. So it's a massive drop in the production of the economy. Now, this is an exercise where I will ask you to use your check function. So over to you. Thinking about it as a measure of measuring the productive output of an economy. So what's being produced in the economy? What do you think are the elements that might affect your standard of living or your well-being that is not included in GDP? And for this I'm asking you to use the check function either the one that only I can see and so you can see and Tanya can see or also if you want to share it with everyone else then of course use the one where everyone can see. And so you can Tanya, I cannot see the check function at the moment. So maybe if you enable your microphones you can just feed me the stuff that comes in. I'll give you maybe a minute to think about the elements that might be excluded. Sophie, would you like me to be telling you as people write it or wait until the end? Yes, please do. This may be as it comes in and we take about, I don't know, a minute. So we've got a few things coming in. We've got interest rates, education levels, healthcare sanitation, level of happiness, green space measure, voluntary babysitting, externalities, for example, pollution, secondhand items. So for example, eBay, life expectancy, environmental concerns, inequality, subsistence farming, lots of ideas coming in, pensions. Amazing. Okay, I'm completely blown away. Let's close this now. So you guys are amazing. Yes, you're absolutely right and you're going in exactly the direction I wanted you to go to. And all of these things, yes, are excluded from GDP and of course are affecting your wellbeing and happiness. And there is kind of, you will find everything that has been said as part of these kind of five point list. So one of the things that is not reflected is the quality of goods and services. Then also activities that are not recorded and also activities that something that is secondhand, for instance, that is not being newly produced. Then sustainability and environmental concerns, of course, externalities are not being accounted for in as part of GDP. So the quality of the air that we breathe is not part of GDP. Also the kind of the idea of value. So only what is being transacted on a marketplace is accounted for in GDPs. It's something like volunteering. It's not being accounted for, it's not being counted in GDP. But of course it plays a huge role in how societies operate and also our wellbeing. The other thing is distribution and inequality came through as well. So who gains and who loses? So who's getting the gains from that growth in GDP and who doesn't? Of course, not everyone will be equally benefiting from that increase. And all of these could probably have a full lecture on all of these different elements. We were focused in the context of COVID-19. We were focused on the last two. So the production, that production only counts if it's transacted on a marketplace. So services that are not transacted on the marketplace are not counted. And also the element of inequality and distribution. So the question, who gains and who loses if GDP increases or shrinks? And that we would see can be quite different especially in the context of COVID-19. So here and I, again, I'm inviting you to use the chat function again. I'm not asking you to read it out this time. I will just talk you through but have a think about these four different examples and whether they might be part of GDP or not. And given the answers that you have just provided me before I think you know the answer to all four of them already. So I'm not asking you to do that exercise but yeah, mentally go through that with me together. So the first thing is a meal in a restaurant. A meal in a restaurant would be counted as GDP. However, if you would cook the same meal not at home then only the part where you do your grocery shopping in the supermarket will be counted as GDP but your labored hours by cooking the meal at home will not be accounted for as part of GDP. Although of course you're producing the meal as the cook in the restaurant or the chef in the restaurant would also produce that same meal. Looking after your elderly relatives for instance is not counted as part of GDP. A child being looked after by a child minder could be counted towards GDP if the child minder is reimbursed voluntarily. So it receives the wage income for the service of looking after that child. However, if that person is not reimbursed then of course that's not being counted towards GDP. Working for no pay in oxfam as part of volunteering also not something that accounts towards GDP. So lots of elements or productive activities and services that we engage in both on an everyday basis but also that make the fabric of what society is and what our economy is and how it operates is not being accounted for as part of GDP. Now why does this matter or why should we be concerned about this? And one of the reasons is the power of GDP. So there's a huge emphasis of the figure of GDP and we constantly hear about GDP as a yardstick of how well our economy does and how well our economy does in a global comparison. But given that these elements are excluded and these elements are important in society, it does matter. So there's one particular critique which comes from the feminist economics background which comes with the argument or fundamentally is based on the argument that this is unfair, that some excluding some of these activities is fundamentally unfair. And why does it come from the feminist economics background? Well, because most of these activities which are unpaid work, so-called unpaid work and not counted for as part of GDP are predominantly done by women. And on the top right-hand side, that figure that kind of gives you a breakdown of the activities or the average hours that both female and male members of a household spend on certain activities, that unpaid labor or unpaid work. So in a way, the GDP puts value on certain activities while it takes value away from certain activities. And by doing that, GDP shapes what policy does focus on. So for instance, the automobile sector, of course, it has a much larger share in GDP than the social care sector. The policy often focus much more on the automobile sector rather than the social care sector while from a societal point of view, maybe the social care sector should at least receive equal attention. Also the value that society, or the value society perceives as being attached to certain activities is often linked to how we're being renumerated for this activity in the economy. And that is reflected then also implicitly in the gender pay gap and also how much, for instance, someone working as a social worker receives as compared to someone who's a financial trader. And the next figure does show you that quite strongly. So this is an interesting figure which compares both the pay gap in certain professions and the size of these little bubbles give you the pay, so the median hourly pay that someone in that sector would receive. So the larger the circle is, the larger the pay that person would receive or that the pay received in that particular sector. And you can see that there are of course huge disparities or huge gender gaps in some sectors where they're quite small ones in others. And for instance, for the largest pay gap which is in favor of female workers is working as a secretary for a company while the largest pay gap in favor of male workers is in metal making or treating processes. So there it's almost like 50% difference. We can see that in some of the sectors like being a director for major organization, there's still a plus 20% pay gap between male and female workers. So one thing that we see here is that there's a huge disparity in wages received across sectors per se. These sectors which have a prominently more female workers than male workers are often the ones that receive a smaller pay than the ones that have prominently more male workers but that's of course not exclusively the case. And within these sectors which are highly paid and maybe have more male workers, there is also still often and not always a pay gap that is in favor of the male worker. But often the disparity between on average, so if you look at the full time job here, it's not only that within the same sector people are receiving unequal pay, depending on their gender, but it's also that which sector you're working in often is differentiated by gender quite strongly. So all of this then kind of contributes to the overall gender pay gap. Now moving on another aspect. So our second aspect we wanted to focus on that is excluded from GDP is the idea of equality or distribution. So who benefits from that increase or suffers from that decrease of GDP? And especially if you think about GDP per capita which is basically taking GDP as an average over the number of citizens in an economy. So there's this kind of famous or kind of almost funny but also sad in a way story about Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon. If he walks into a coffee on average everyone in this coffee is a billionaire. Of course no one else in that coffee although on average they're now all billionaires will actually benefit from this. And that shows you how misleading the GDP per capita can be. So if it's just a few number of people who have the largest share of that GDP figure but everyone else has received quite little, that means that the benefit of an increase in GDP also only cruise to very few. And that's something that we have seen actually over time since the 80s that GDP might rise that increase or benefit is not shared equally and increasingly actually it's shared unequally. And then the right hand side this is exactly what this figure shows you the share of income that is going to the richest 1% households. And you can see that that if we were in a totally equal society that share should always be 1%. So the richest 1% should get the 1% of the income. And we see that over time it's actually gone up to 8% which means that there's a much larger weight on the high income households than on the small ones. So the other things that this pattern of inequality is not necessarily just differentiated by income per se but also highly intersected with both gender raised disability and also use. So increasingly age and that's something that's important especially in the context of COVID-19. Now having learned these two different lenses which are through which we can critique GDP as this being excluded but of course clearly being important for the well-being of the individual member of a society as well as for the socioeconomic impact of any economic activity or the state of the economy. Let's focus on COVID-19 and what it does to both the gender dimension and the inequality dimension and how this might not be reflected in the figures that or the GDP figure. Now let's start with that's kind of the perception of the impact of COVID-19 at the beginning of the crisis. So that's now talking about maybe March. So when we were at the beginning of the first lockdown we reached news and a lot of research was done on kind of the negative short-term impact. There was talk about a V-shaped recovery kind of some sectors clearly benefiting while others being hard hit and particularly negatively impacted where non-food retail service and transport industries but there was also this kind of talk about we all in it together and COVID-19 being seen as a great level as of course disease doesn't kind of differentiate between income between wealth. But the thing is that it kind of does and it doesn't peculiar way and we will look at this in particular to also talk about work from home being normalized. So that's something that's probably not going to go away. However, especially at the beginning now increasingly more this is done actually that there's little analysis of the socioeconomic inequalities that I accelerated by COVID-19. So at the beginning it was that it surfaced that a lot of the inequalities kind of were let's say put into focus by COVID-19 but now we also understand that actually these inequalities have been exacerbated by COVID-19. So it's not only that there's a light shown on these and they more visible now it's also that these inequalities have become more severe throughout the crisis especially in some context. Now, next exercise for you think about in which ways COVID-19 has had a socioeconomic impact that may not be captured by GDP. And also think about ways in how COVID-19 has shifted priorities. So what might have improved despite GDP being so dramatically reduced. So although we have seen like almost like a 10% fall in GDP maybe something has improved socioeconomically for you, for society as a whole. Over to you, one minute again anything you can think of and Tanya maybe you can feed me feed me the input that we receive from our amazing viewers. They're coming in already so I'm gonna start reading it off right now before I lose it. So decrease in pollution people are more focused on mental health in educational systems, increased poverty, medical innovation and investment has improved. So there's a few pros and cons actually I've noticed COVID-19 might lead to green and sustainable economy in the future. People have put more effort into building relationships to help their mental health, poor mental health, removing workers from employment, more focus on societal hygiene and sanitation, vaccine time requirements, building vaccine, ability to work from home, technology has improved over this time, improvement in air quality leading to fewer cases of asthma attacks. So quite a lot in there, poor social skills for those born within COVID-19 times, factories of businesses shutting down may lead to a decrease in pollution and finally increased inequalities between genders. So service sectors employing a proportionately more female bane community put to the top of the agenda. Oh, wow. So this has really inspired people, disclosure of business leading to higher unemployment, students missing out on education and collaboration between competitors, countries, pharmaceuticals. And I think I keep going. You're still pouring in. Yeah, you are amazing. You basically doing my job here. So exactly, I mean, a lot of, all of this is absolutely correct. And this is exactly again, the direction I want to go into. So this is just a snippet again from the news and kind of reflecting a little bit on the gender and also sustainability dimension of COVID-19. So there has been kind of a lot of talk about the normalization of a greater sharing of childcare, for instance, and working, well, housework, like working in the household, that there maybe might be a better understanding of or greater quality of this work being shared between female and male members of the household. However, on the, of course, negative side and quite certainly domestic violence cases and instances of abuse have risen quite dramatically. And of course that's also linked to a lot of the mental health issues that have been highlighted in the responses that we got. The environment is recovering as a result of the reduced car use and fewer flights and also shutting down of factories, exactly right. So of course that's a benefit that the air quality and a lot of you who might be based in London will have noticed that. I mean, I have noticed that definitely that once we were in lockdown, suddenly the air quality was quite different and it has increased your quality of life from that perspective, of course, in other elements it has decreased but it has made quite a difference. And also it has kind of initiated a lot of very, very important debates about the value of certain professions. So we had our students and care workers that were probably undervalued and also highly underpaid. And there are lots of calls for them probably being better paid. So a lot of, as also, yeah, the discussion on the BAM community, that's something that we're gonna move into as well. That has highlighted a lot of the inequalities that kind of were almost invisible in society but have been there for a really long time. And that has been now blatantly, become blatantly visible. And also to an extent that it can't be ignored by the mainstream and politicians any longer. So that's quite important contributions because of that came out of that crisis. Now, of course, there are also many downsides to it. So when we look at it from the distribution inequality issue, we can see that actually the wealth of the richest has dramatically risen while a lot of millions of people have been thrown into devastating situations when it comes to income and wage earnings that people have lost their jobs. And so that's, again, a few headlines that the wealth gap is of course increasing and that's increasing both because those who were at the low end of wage earnings of both the wealth side and the income side and now many of them have lost their jobs while those who before were at the high end are now becoming even richer as the stock market has continued to increase. So the pandemic does hit the poorest, the hardest and inequality rises. And also there's a huge race dimension in that inequality as well. So inequality has risen between groups that are intersect with income, with race, with ethnicity, with gender. And also, and that's an important element, held and especially the health, not only COVID-19, but also how healthy your body was before does intersect with inequalities. The global aspect was talked about. So a lot about how globally we need to support each other. Different countries need to support each other since it's a pandemic, we can only battle it jointly. But on the flip side, there's still a lot of fight about patterns of vaccines that are being protected. So yeah, so it has kind of supported a collaboration but at the same time, there's also a lot of interest that are being protected. So a lot of plus, a lot of minus things that kind of have come out of COVID-19, but one thing, it has definitely made these dynamics more visible, both the inequalities as well as kind of the gender dimensions when it comes to unpaid work since we're working from home. So I've collated or put on one slide things that we definitely know. So of course, the pandemic is ongoing. There's a lot of research that is being done at the moment about the economic and the social and health impact of the ongoing crisis. But a few things we know for sure already given that the data has been collected. So what do we know about the different ways in which COVID-19 has increased inequalities? What we know for sure is that low-paid workers are more represented in the sectors that have suspended activities. So those people who have been on the lower end of wage earnings, they're also more susceptible to losing their job entirely. And that's a shot that I haven't found this for the UK, but it looks as I've seen the figures for the UK and looks very similar. And this one is for the US and it divides on the X-axis into deciles. So 10% of parts, the sectors that are on average have the lowest wages and on average the highest wages. So you can see that the sectors which have the 10% and the 10% group of the lowest wages have a 33% chance of being shut down. So these jobs being lost while the sectors that are on the highest 10% end have about a 6% chance of being shut down. So much lower risk of losing your job if you're a high wage earner than if you're a low wage earner. The second thing is that I think minorities, young adults and women are much more likely to be in lower paid works. Again, I haven't found one on ethnic minorities but I have found some data and on average black workers earn 9% and Bangladeshi workers earn 20% less than the average white worker in Britain. So there's a massive difference there. And the chart on the bottom right shows you the dimension by gender and age. And you can clearly see that again going back to the sectors where predominantly female workers work and where predominantly male workers work and the female workers being more in the lower paid on average on the lower paid sector side. And that clearly comes through in this figure as well where again, you can see that on the y-axis again is the share, this is the percentage share of those sectors that are being shut down and also high probability of losing your job is predominantly affecting the younger workers and also predominantly affecting female workers rather than male workers. So a cross-section of all these dimensions we have talked about before. A higher share of low paid workers are also essential services. So essential workers, key workers which are more likely to be exposed to COVID-19. Of course, that's not exclusively the case but it is the case for on average. And also, and this is quite bat leaf from the perspective of how do we contain the crisis? Non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, obesity, heart disease are linked to higher COVID death rates or that the affected patients that are about to be affected by COVID-19 to the extent that they need hospitalization are strongly associated with poverty. So the lower the income level of your household, the higher the probability of these household suffering from household member suffering from these non-communicable diseases which make you more exposed to COVID-19. So those are the most vulnerable often to having a severe effect due to or severe illness due to COVID-19. Also the ones on average which are the most exposed in society because these are the ones working as the low paid and essential service workers. Now, all of this is of course not reflected in GDP. So now moving back into kind of the idea of GDP and what kind of the 10% drop of GDP tells us and what it doesn't tell us. And all of these stories, how different parts of the population are very differently affected by the crisis. So of course not visible and reflected in that figure. So what if we go beyond GDP? What are the alternatives? Do we have alternatives? And then indeed are. And there's a lot of big parts of the economic, well, economists basically are thinking quite carefully about this and it's not only economists but also social scientists, political scientists and also people working in natural science collaborating and coming up with the measure that might more better reflect our wellbeing actually and the state of our economy and how well it serves increasing the wellbeing of a society. So some examples that just listed here which is kind of the happy planet index by the new economic foundation, the letter to prosperity index, the social progress index. But there's also a lot of kind of different schools of thoughts you might have heard about the donut economy and a lot of growing emphasis on social and ecological criterias that need to be considered as part of measuring or capturing the extent of standard of living and wellbeing of a society rather than just the number of the quantities that are being outputted. So in conclusion, GDP is still our main indicator of and it's being used as kind of a proxy for standard of living and wellbeing although increasingly being questioned but we cannot overestimate the importance that is being put on GDP, especially from a policy focus. So no country wants to see its GDP shrinking. There's almost countries being afraid of this happening and maybe that might be misguided and we need to look deeper into what does it mean that economy shrinks. GDP is widely taken as a measure to assess the economic impact of COVID-19. However, as we have highlighted there are various issues with that. The two main ones we have discussed is the idea of value. So if we put an equal sign the transaction value, so the price that has been put on a particular service or particular product with its value to society then that might be really misguided because a lot of the things that make our society or keep our society together it's not valued at all because it's not transacted on a marketplace or it's undervalued in terms of low paid jobs and this is a feminist critique on GDP. But there's also an angle of inequality. GDP to say nothing about how the benefits of or the pain of this reduction in GDP affects different groups differently. And often what we see that an increase in GDP does affect or a few might benefit to a large extent from that. Well, a decrease in a quite different group will suffer than the ones that might benefit. And that's an important consideration if we want to measure the wellbeing of a society as a whole. Of course, now the above two concerns have especially been kind of highlighted the socioeconomic impact of COVID-19 both in the UK and globally. So these two factors are quite important especially in the context of COVID-19 as we have just seen. So there are alternatives. But big question to you and hopefully this can guide the discussions we have now is will GDP be the throne? Should it be? Should we think about an alternative measure to GDP that takes its place? Why should that be the case? Or why should that not be the case? So that's these our discussion points for just a minute. If you're interested in these type of debates we have a very active as a department very active seminar series which changes its title every academic year. Our title for topic overarching topic for this year is identifying inequalities and the limitations of global capitalism. And there are lots of talks which are freely available so you can anyone can tune in especially now that everything is online we all learned how to use Zoom and various other platforms. So these are streamed and they feel available via either our Twitter account or our Facebook account or our website. So if you're interested in these kind of questions you very welcome to join these debates where we're taking these things these type of discussions further especially on the ecological side which is something that came a bit short in the well in today's lecture. So yeah contact us if you are interested in either these topics or studying with us and thank you for listening and I hope you enjoyed the presentation. I will now end this screen sharing so I can actually see what you're telling me. Brilliant. Any questions, debates? So we've only got about five minutes left where that was really an interesting and quite a lot of big questions asked but I wanted to give our two student ambassadors a chance just to introduce themselves and to say a little bit about what it's like being a student. Yes. So we've got Abba and So-Yoon. So So-Yoon would you like to start and just say a little bit about being a student So-Yoon and Abba if you'd also like to share? Yes, sure. Thank you so much for the introduction. My name is So-Yoon Kim. I'm a final year student pursuing politics and economics at So-Yoon. I do a lot of positions outside of my academics as such as I'm part of the So-Yoon peer mentoring scheme as well as the economy ambassador that I'm standing here right now as well as I'm a part of the career service team as a careers ambassador. One thing that I would like to especially emphasize since So-Yoon did a brilliant job in setting a solid example of a high quality education that is provided as So-Yoon is that So-Yoon is a very supportive community. There are a lot of resources and helps that you can reach out to that make your uni life so much easier and so much better. And we have excellent career services. We got excellent education and we have a really fun communities with loads of societies and we are located at the heart of London where you have tons and tons of opportunities where internships were volunteering activities if you're interested. Over to you, Abba. Hi, I'm Abba. I'm currently a first year student doing economics and politics. And yeah, I like to think like it's such a nice community here. There's so many different societies and like literally any society that you could think of and there's just so many opportunities even though we're online to be engaging with like uni life and like economics is such a good subject as well because it's so like essential to just how society is. And you know, yeah, but yeah. That's great. We've got, let's see, three minutes left. There was like a question in the chat which was and there's been a lot of chat just about general reflections and questions. We've got a very engaged group of students on this or potential students on this session which I'm very impressed with. But there was a question about, has COVID-19 affected or influenced economic policy in achieving its macroeconomic objectives? Sorry, say the first one again. My mic. So has COVID-19 affected or influenced economic policy in achieving its macroeconomic objectives? That depends on what the macroeconomic objectives of policy are. I think it put a lot of very, very important topics on the top of the agenda that have been forgotten for a very, very long time. So there's definitely, there's this kind of strange saying of which is exploited by all kind of political spectrums which means never have a good crisis go to waste. And that's definitely the case. So you see the entire political spectrum now coming up and trying to put their kind of priorities on the top of the agenda. But I think there are some points which now can no longer be denied or ignored because it's just in your face, it's just factually there. So how COVID-19 has affected different communities differently. No one can deny that. I mean, I'm sure there are still people who denying that but I just say so. So no one who looks at the data and doesn't engage in conspiracy theories can deny that this is the case. And I think that's quite an important development. Now, from a macroeconomic perspective, the biggest challenge at the moment, of course, is deptedness and how do we deal with sovereign debt? And that's an issue that will affect all countries across the globe, especially countries who are on the kind of middle income or low income countries who have less ability to source credit than other countries who kind of are more on the high income level. But even high income countries do need to rethink the way how sovereign debt is being structured. So that's definitely a challenge. That doesn't mean that there's a lot of this saying of future generations need to pay for this debt. That's not true. So that if you ever say that doesn't understand the issue of sovereign debt. So the debt at a national level is very different at household debt. So for one thing, a household cannot print its own money, which is a very important, as you would all agree, probably a very important distinction between a household and a country. So countries do have their own currency, which makes the whole wave how they're dealing with debt quite different from the household level. And there's also a huge debate about, I mean, now that we know how much that debt can be taken out in order to prioritize certain economic and political interests. So now maybe that money can be put to use to facilitate other interests, such as climate, to navigate and mitigate climate change, for instance. And probably that debate of like, we don't have that money is now not as strong. That argument is not as strong as it was before since COVID-19 has shown that the taking out such an amount of debt is actually seems to be feasible. So I think it's more of a, it has triggered so many so interesting debate and a social scientist and an economist, we will have decades to research on this. And the massive output that's being generated by academics at the moment is breathtaking. And students as well. I mean, if you're interested in what our students are doing, look at our SOAS block. There's so many brilliant contributions by SOAS economic students, amazing on all sorts of COVID related issues, but also other hugely important issues just to get an idea what our students are interested as well. Yeah, well, I think that I'll just wrap up and finish with some thoughts from my point of view. We were talking recently with the new director about all of the different subjects we teach at SOAS. And he asked, which subject do you think connects all of the subjects? And I said, it's got to be economics because economics runs through everything right now. And it's a very exciting time because economics ties in with politics, with development, with everything you look at, you could touch on it with economics in that point of view. So I think there's a lot to be discussed and covered. And there's a lot of questions. And if we were actually in a seminar, this discussion could go on, but hopefully this has given everyone a taste of what it's like to be a student at SOAS and the kinds of dialogue that happen. And you've met some of our students and some of our academics. So I really hope that you've enjoyed it. We will circulate the recording so you can see this afterwards. And we hope to see some of you at SOAS in September when we start the new year. So thank you all very much. And thank you to our panelists and have a wonderful rest of the day.