 In the past few days of the conference, we've heard a rich set of discussions on the effects of COVID, but also the implications of the pandemic for development moving forward. The panels and keynotes in the conference have covered a range of issues and themes from debt, gender inequality, extreme poverty, food insecurity, informality, domestic business mobilization, the environment, governance, and many other issues. We also learned about the effectiveness of policy responses that we've seen so far in the global south, and also the regional dimensions of the pandemic in East and South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. In this closing panel, we've brought together a set of leading thinkers to discuss how COVID-19 is changing development. The panel will take stock on what has been learned about the effect of the pandemic on the lives and livelihoods of citizens in developing countries. The panel will also look to the future and assess how the pandemic may affect global development in the years to come and the achievement of the sustainable development goals. Let me now introduce the panelists in the order that they will speak. Marty Chen is the first panelist, she is a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Carrier School and senior advisor of the global network, Women in Informal Employment, Globalizing and Organizing, WIGO, in short. An experienced development practitioner and scholar, her area of specialization is the working poor in the informal economy. Marty was awarded the Padma Shree by the Government of India. She's also chair of the wider board. Second panelist is Fatima Denton. Fatima is the director of the United Nations University Institute for Natural Resources in Africa, UNU Indra. She has depth of expertise in natural resource management as well as deep knowledge of research and policy development in the African region. Prior to joining UNU Indra, Fatima worked with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, UNECA, in Ethiopia since 2012. Our third panelist is David Hsu. David is professor of development studies at the University of Manchester, but is executive director of the Global Development Institute and CEO of the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Center. He's worked on rural development, poverty and poverty reduction, microfinance, the role of NGOs in conflict and peace and development. Environmental management, social protection, and the political economy of global poverty for more than 30 years. Our fourth panelist is Rohiton Medhora. Rohiton is president of CIGI, a think tank based in Canada. Rohiton sits on the Lancet and Financial Trans Commission on Governing Health Futures 2030, as well as the Commission on Global Economic Transformation, Co-Chair by the Nobel Economics Laureates, Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz. He serves in the Boards of the Institute for Neoeconomic Thinking and the McLean Foundation, and is on the advisory boards of the WTO chairs program, UNE Merit, and the Global Health Center. Welcome to all of you. I'm going to ask each of the panelists a question to motivate the discussion. Each panelist will speak for about five minutes. But you'll leave around 20, 25 minutes for Q&A, and we hope to get several questions in the Q&A session itself. So let me move on to the first question that's to Marty. Marty, my question to you is, we heard from the UN Secretary General many times that we need to build back better. So how can the developing world build back better? What can the community do in this regard? Marty, go to you. Thank you so much, Kunal, for this opportunity. As you mentioned, we are all painfully aware that the COVID pandemic recession has led to major reversals in poverty reduction, in reducing hunger and inequality. So the premise of my brief remarks is that supporting informal workers who represent the majority of workers to recover their livelihoods is a key path to, again, being on the path to reducing poverty, hunger and inequality, but also to economic recovery. And this is because we now know that 61% of all workers globally are informally employed, and it's 90% of workers in developing countries. A total of 2 billion workers. We also know that most informal workers are from poor households and disadvantaged communities. But we also know that their earnings contribute to keeping their households from extreme poverty and, in many cases, to helping their households move out of poverty. And we also know that informal workers contribute to the economy and to society. They produce goods and services at low costs for formal firms, for domestic and global supply chains, for the general public, and for low-income communities. But pre-COVID, they were widely stigmatized. They were stigmatized as being non-compliant or outside the reach of the state. And yet, every day, on a regular basis, they faced harassments, they faced bribes, they faced confiscation of goods, evictions. They were also stigmatized for having low productivity, for being a drag on the economy. But they were seldom given any support to increase their productivity and were excluded from economic plans and policies. And they were often even penalized or criminalized for trying to earn an honest living. The COVID pandemic recession has shifted our focus a bit or our thinking a bit because it's now widely recognized that the crisis disproportionately impacted the informal workers because they could not work remotely. And that they faced almost immediately with the lockdowns last year, a triple crisis of food, sorry, work, income, and then food insecurity. And in order to cope, they became deeper in debt, drew down savings, sold or mortgaged assets and became triply handicapped for recovery. Some received relief in the first wave, but it was inadequate. And few governments are continuing relief until now. So actually, for most informal workers, we have done a longitudinal study. The situation in 2021 is worse than in 2020. And making matters even worse, informal workers have not been targeted in economic recovery schemes. And they find it very difficult to access or afford any of the what's on offer. And so we really need, as a global community, the international policy community and national governments, we have an opportunity, we have a choice to build a better new deal for informal workers who constitute the majority of workers, the majority of the working poor, the broad base of the economy by rebuilding economies from below rather than from top down and thereby reducing poverty, hunger, and inequality. And this better new deal for informal workers does not require a lot of additional finance. What it requires is a change in mindset. The fundamentals, the three fundamentals of this new deal, a better new deal, are to recognize and value informal workers for their economic contributions, integrate their informal livelihoods into economic plans and policies, and address the structural constraints, the risks and biases faced by informal workers. And the two principles of a better new deal are first and foremost, do no harm, stop the harassment, bribes, confiscations, and evictions, and reverse the negative narrative, the stigmatization. And the second is nothing for us without us, the motto of the global movement of informal workers, which is that they would like a seat at the policymaking table when recovery and regulatory reforms are being planned. Thank you. Thank you, Marti. This is of course an important question here, that the slogan of the mantra, Build Back Better, how long will policymakers keep that in mind? So that's important, and we need to get back to that very important question in the Q&A. So let me move on to Fatima now. Fatima, from your vantage point, as the director of one of the leading institutes on natural resources in the global South, what are the lessons from the pandemic on how human beings should interact with the natural world? Thank you, Kunal. Can you hear me? Yes, very clearly. Thank you, Fatima. Go ahead. OK, and thank you very much, and thanks for the opportunity to be part of this conversation. Let me sort of start by saying that to a large extent, COVID has been some sort of a double-edged sword. In many ways, beyond the devastation that we have witnessed in terms of loss of human lives, there is a sense that it has been hugely disruptive to development processes. We're already experiencing problems related to an SDG implementation deficit. I think that deficit has been reinforced now with COVID. But let me say why I think it's a double-edged sword. It's a double-edged sword in a way because it has disrupted a lot of the development processes, the SDG being one of them. And it's a double-edged sword in the sense that beyond the disruption that we have seen, as I've mentioned, it is also a litmus test in many ways for us to see whether we're properly along with the development ambition that we have. And I have to say that on the latter, one observation that we can for the pandemic is the fact that when I look at the area where I'm most active in terms of natural resource management and climate change, I have to say that the level of our ambition for a carbon neutral is not very well aligned with our business model. And in many ways, COVID has made that very clear that we're way behind in terms of where we want to get to. We're way behind because, like I said, the business model is not well attuned to where we're headed. Our supply chains have shown that they are rather vulnerable and rather weak. We don't have sufficient buffers. And we are not sourcing our goods close to home. And we've seen how many of these supply chains have been broken. I think Marty has said a lot about the informal sector, who are off the sidelines. They're often peripheralized. They are often under margins of development, even though they have a huge role to play in the development process. The tools that we need to get us to a safer growth, the tools that we need to get us to a carbon neutral future, the transitional drivers that we need are not in place. These are all part of why COVID has been such a disruptive element. And has held that both for the developed world and the developing world, we are woefully on the prepared or ill-prepared, I would say. If this is an induction course, if it's a rehearsal, we failed because we were so not prepared for it. Let me make two points in terms of that lack of preparation and where it's most visible. The first thing I would say, especially when we look at the state of affairs where climate change is concerned, is that we saw a massive, I would say, decline in terms of energy investments, a massive drop in terms of the demand for energy. But we are also now seeing a rebound, a rebound, I'd say, in terms of that very energy, especially in terms of fossil fuels. So on the one hand, I was almost tempted to say that it has changed the landscape, the energy landscape as it is. But on the other hand, I think it's fair to say that we are seeing some sense of rebound. And I think what is a bit worrying is the fact that the energy, which I would say, to a large extent, is the culprit of heavy emissions. In other words, the current state of climate crisis is as a result of that energy system in itself. That's the very energy system that is a barrier to how it gets to a safer growth, how we could build back better. Because as I said, fossil fuel is still the dominant fuel. We are using fossil fuel in the petrochemical industry, in the transportation industry, in the energy sector in itself. So fossil fuel hasn't actually become the subordinate fuel in spite of the crisis and in spite of those initial observations that we saw. So this is a problem. And it's a problem precisely because the countries that are facing dire energy poverty that desperately need this energy for their development processes, for industrialization, those countries themselves are very much inclined to move towards fossil fuel energy sources, even though we know that the cost of renewable energies are coming down. But there are issues around the upfront capital cost of renewable energies in terms of the massive penetration of these energies. We're not seeing enough of that. So the scalar effect that we need to see is not quite there yet. So that's one example. The other example I would say is that countries in Africa especially are now hugely indebted. They are already carrying this death burden, which means that the very technologies that they would need to be able to get to that transition process is already in itself constrained because they have to go back into further debt. And very often, they have to go to the same lenders. So that's a problem in itself in terms of the justice aspect of climate change, in terms of the equity aspect of climate change, and in terms of the transitional processes. We're not all at the same starting point. We're not all at the same level. Our transitional tools are not the same. We do not all have the capacity, the infrastructure, the resources, the knowledge to be able to get to a faster transition pathway. So I would say that this is a problem. It's a problem also because many of the countries in Africa are very tempted to use cheap coal. And there are examples. Zambia is in bad way. To use cheap coal, then to go towards renewable energy sources. They have a constrained space with regard to fiscal loss because many of them would have gotten quite a lot of funding coming or resources coming from the exploitation of their energy resources. And that in itself was helping with some of the strategic investment. In Ghana, the oil revenue was supporting free education, high school education. In Angola and Mozambique, some of the oil revenue was also supporting health infrastructure. So we're not going to see that to the extent that it was made possible. But this, I think, is a huge problem. Let me say this last point and stop there. If we don't take equity seriously in the transition process, we'll have to get back to status block because equity is a very divisive point, but it's also a make or break issue. And if we can say from a developing country perspective, if we are asking Africa, the first continent, to go away without its coal, and its gas, and its oil, there are very good reasons why Africa should do this because there are benefits to going the green pathway and project. But if we're asking Africa, as the first continent to develop, to be some element of solitude, so ensure that we need to get to that trap that should be made available. And right now, the Bilbaq mantra is very strict. Much of the risk should really help in terms of getting there and not in place. So we are way beyond of a level of ambition we actually want to do without ambition. So these are some of the difficulties that we're having currently, where I would say that it's going to set us behind. And those countries that are already constrained are going to find themselves even more constrained. And they would have to draw on the constrained resources that they have to be able to get further, further along in terms of the carbon neutral pathway. Fatima, thank you so much. I mean, you raise a very important point about equity. And Coffin is coming up very soon. The question really is, how will the International Committee exactly help, as you said, especially African countries in this transition towards carbon, towards more renewable energy, for example. So that's something we need to get back to again in the Q&A. I'm going to move on now to David Hume. David, the pandemic has been a global phenomenon. Practically no country, rich or poor, have been spared. So to what extent has Coffin 19 accentuated the case for a global rather than international development paradigm? What would be a response to this question? Should we think about a global development international development paradigm? Thank you, David. Go ahead. OK, yeah, and I'll make the case for certainly a global development paradigm. But I mean, just I think what we've heard from Fatima and Marty is great in that. But we must be reminded about the micro, too, and the fact that there are millions of deaths in individuals of families and 150 million people who are now in deep poverty and suffering and that. And we have to, I think, keep on going back to that and we need to use the statistics, but just realize the volume of human suffering that has been generated and has not been managed effectively and how we need to stop that suffering. But I'd make the case that actually, and I was looking at when I was looking at some of the conference documents, which we're talking quite a lot about global north and global south. But when we look at the outcomes of the pandemic and when we look at the processes underpinning it and the processes that are evolving, then the patterns are really complicated. There's been quite a complicated geography in a way of outcomes on lives and livelihoods and that there have been these two, three, four waves, which have meant that countries that appear to be successful suddenly are no longer successful. The processes that seem to be helping or hindering are swept away. And so I think we do need to focus much more on the messy nature of global development, these complex webs of relationships, flows of finance, flows of people, flows of goods and services, data, technology, and ideas. And some of these ideas are about pandemics, but many of the ideas are about things like neopopulist and right-wing politics that have spread around the world and have really shaped very greatly how the pandemic has been responded to. And I think that, in a way, the convenient binary framework that we still tend to use in development of looking at the global north and the global south, but not being able to quite define those, we really need to move away from that and recognize that there are great differences that putting these into a binary can be very dangerous. And I was looking at some of the recent writing on the pandemic and there's a lot of well-intentioned analysis of vaccine apartheid, and it is horrendous how little vaccine is getting through to Africa. But apartheid, in a way, suggests black-white, suggests Europe-African relationships. But to understand what's happening, you've got to look at China, you've got to look at India, you've got to look at Russia and the Sputnik vaccine, and you need to look at this much more complicated set of patterns that we've got. I think if one looks at those, then one can see the way in which certainly the COVID-19, the pandemic, is sort of deepening and accelerating quite a few of the development processes. Innovation and research and development of the vaccines is no longer based in North America and Europe, as it usually would have been. It's also occurring in China extensively. India is incredibly important in the manufacturing and the production and its global value chains of the vaccines, and we have the Russian Sputnik vaccine there. So we need to recognize that the old North and South is certainly not the convenient way that it used to work. If we look on influence on these processes, then really the US has tended to opt for the sidelines in terms of global leadership over the pandemic. China has had the chance to take on more of a leadership role, but hasn't aggressively pursued that at the present time. But in a way, the old patterns, the hegemony that used to be talked about by many writers of the US and of Western European and North American companies is no longer the case. These global value chains are much more complicated. So I really do think that we need to think in terms of global development to understand what's been happening and what could happen in the future. When we look at these and certainly what's been happening in terms of outcomes and contributions to the Bates, then governance comes out incredibly importantly, and we can see the way that if one looks at the outcomes, then it's not there's been a set of outcomes in the global North and in the global South, but we've had the pandemic badly managed in the North as in the USA, as in the UK, badly managed in the South, certainly in Brazil and Peru, and many of the Latin American economies are coming out very bad if you look at mortality or if you look at the impact on GDP. But we've also had effective management in countries that are emerging in Singapore, in China, and in countries which are lower middle income. Vietnam and Senegal have had pretty effective responses. And so these patterns suggest that we simply cannot put things into global North and global South boxes. We need to be looking at these much more varied patterns and the way in which one can get effective governance, one can get governments that can hear what science says and respond to it as in the case of Senegal, as in the case of Vietnam, which have relatively limited resources and one can get governments in the USA in particular with enormous wealth, enormous resources, but not able to hear what the science is saying, partly the problem of the government, partly a problem of the public understanding of science and the way in which the public's are behaving. I think a really important question probably for the evolution of global development in the future is the degree to which in democracies that have had poor performance in terms of managing the pandemic is whether the populists who have led those countries managed to get away with it, whether democracy has the power to hold them to account or whether they can blame it on the China virus, whether they can blame it on the scientists, whether they can blame it on variants coming from other countries. And I think we'll have to see how well democracy can perform with that. With the final point I'd make, I've gone for my three Gs. Let's think global development, make sure we think about governance and the way that leads to these very different processes apart from wealth in these patterns. And it's about the gaps and particularly about the multilateral gap. And the key thing in a way that comes out is that even though we've moved from the international development, the global north dominating the development agenda, saying what the millennium development goals would be, aid financing shaping development with the SDGs, we've moved forward to the whole UN membership saying what development is, we've moved forward to development finance being important, not just foreign aid from richer countries, but we still have a multilateral gap. We still can't mobilize the multilateral action that is needed. And the sheer lunacy of this at the moment, many high income countries are looking at the boost of vaccination, the third injection, but we know that that means that the opportunity for mutation and new varieties in countries that haven't got high access to vaccines puts our own populations to threat in the future as well as leading to greater suffering in countries that haven't got higher access to the vaccines. So I really think we need to look at this multilateral gap particularly in terms of public health and we need to certainly make sure that the emphasis on private health and individual health which has tended to evolve over the years that we realize now that public health is good for individuals as well as for populations. And we also need to think about social protection, get the ideas out like universal basic income because we found that you can't switch suddenly into social protection when the pandemic happens in the same way as we found out back in the finance crisis of 2007-08, you can't suddenly switch to it. And we need to think about how we can get systems of social protection working around the world that will give us the tools to deal with the next crisis that comes along. Thanks. Thanks, David. Let me move on to Rohit in a straighter way. Rohit would be already had heard already the discussion about inequality, equities in the global economy and the global infrastructure itself. And I think that's a really important question that I would like you to address. So how can international architecture be improved to address the glaring inequalities that we've seen around vaccine distribution, around macrochromic imbalances? What would can we do better on this record? Thanks, Rohit. Great. Well, Kunal, first, thank you for having me at your conference even if it's virtually, it's always good to be with you and colleagues at wider. You know, a few days ago, we, the global community, delivered its five billionth dose of the vaccine. And so there was some cause for celebration but also analysis and alarm. And that goes to the heart of your question about vaccine inequalities and macroeconomic imbalances. Because the way those five billion doses have been administered is interesting. If you look at the number of doses for 100 eligible population, for high income countries, it is 108. In other words, many people have been double vaccinated. For upper middle income countries, it's about 102 per 100 population. Again, healthy levels of vaccination. Lower middle income countries, 32 per 100. And low income countries, two per 100. So that is the stark reality that we face when it comes to imbalances. This is both a medical and public health imbalance but it is also a macroeconomic imbalance. So let me sort of treat each of those in turn. I should say that in the first, you mentioned the architecture that we have and David talked about it too. Others have as well. In the first three and especially three to six months of the crisis last year, basically the international cooperation system went missing exactly when we needed it the most. In those early days, when we knew that this was a global crisis, the G20 was absent. Most solutions that were thoughtful ones went absent. And in fact, it was the case that countries were actually reneging on their international commitments by imposing ad hoc restrictions to trade on important portions of trade. And we saw the advent of what was then, even though we didn't have a vaccine, vaccine nationalism. Many countries, 76 out of 91 in the IMF pantheon, had strictures on spending and in fact were under compressive regimes because of the conditions on their loans. And so you found that at a time when rich countries could spend their way out of the problem, poor countries once again could not because they were restricted from doing so. Now, no one's suggesting that poor countries could go the route of rich countries because there would be a currency crisis. But again, the imbalances are indicative. Rich countries spent about 22% of their GDP in post-COVID emergency funding, emerging market 6%, low-income countries 2%. So you find a sort of expansion of inequalities created by the lack of economic ability to deal with the crisis. And of course, and this is the one that worries me much more, imbalances in the global innovation system, which lead to number one, a concentration of where R&D and innovation happens, where production happens, and ultimately through the global IP regime, how vaccines are distributed and how they're made available. And is it vaccines that are made available or is it the IP? And so we've gone from short-term palliative such as the $650 billion increase in SDR allocations, which I think is a good step, to asking ourselves what might be the long-term solutions here. And so let me stop on this point since you mentioned architecture that I'd say moving from a regime in which SDR allocations are ad hoc, which is what the current system is, to one where you actually make SDR allocations systematized and ideally counter cyclical, would be entirely in keeping with the intent of global cooperation, enlightened self-interest for the West, as well as sensible economic theory that we've come to accept domestically at the national level. Second, I think we need much more management of the way IP is created. And since IP is created mostly as a public-private partnership, Operation Warp Speed in the US is a very good example of that, it stands to reason that the IP, the resulting IP then cannot be distributed along purely private sector lines. And so we have to think about IP as a global public good, as a colleague of mine has said, American good. And if it indeed is American good with public-private characteristics in its funding, then we have to think more carefully in terms of how the vaccines are distributed, how innovation happens globally, and it is ultimately those kinds of long-term structural changes that we need if we need to see ourselves through to the next crisis. And so let me end on the point that Marty made, that this isn't all about money, a lot of it is, but it's actually about rethinking the way we treat global public goods. It's about rethinking large swaths of humanity and our empathy for them and dealing them into decision-making, which, as she correctly pointed out, is not just about money, but it is actually about changing the way we think about the collective good. Thank you, Rohanjit. Of course, the question one can ask here is that we've had crisis of this kind before, not as of this nature perhaps, but we had one in 2008. But nothing really was done in many ways to reform the international financial architecture. So the question is, will that be happening now? And that we can return to that later on. I would like to see the question of the audience, we haven't got as much as yet. What I was wondering is that whether maybe somebody needs some new team perhaps, because I can hear an echo, but I was wondering whether any of the panelists would respond to others around what you've heard so far from each other. It would be good to get a conversation going first among five or four of you, and while you're making some more questions on the audience. Anyone to respond to what you've heard from other panelists? Marti, I think you wanted to say something. I wasn't actually raising my hand, but I was struck by the complementarity of the remarks, and I was struck by the different ways of thinking about inequality and inequity at the country level between countries and within countries at the micro level. And I was intrigued by Ro Hinton's closing on those figures on how much vaccine per hundred persons, and also how much spending on relief and recovering by the country income groups. I think those figures are very sobering, and we really do have to deal with the inequalities in today's world at the macro and the micro level. Thank you, Marti. I see a question here from the audience, and again to the audience, please keep on sending your questions in the Q&A feature, and we're collating the questions here. And the question here actually, I think it's perhaps for David to answer. The question is as follows. Do COVID-based development patterns really look so global? I mean, look at how economic innovation processes are reshaping global accumulation, send them back to the government, processes are reshaping global accumulation, send it on US and European based big pharma and big tech. So at one level, one might say there is a global development paradigm, another level one sees increasing concentration, especially in fact, as Ro Hinton mentioned, there are innovation and accumulation. So David, would you like to respond to this question? Please, thanks. I was listening as Ro Hinton was speaking, and certainly when one looks at where one can look to apply the old fashioned global north and global south, then when one looks at those figures on access to vaccinations and the number of vaccinations for the population, then we certainly do appear to be going back to this binary being able to explain what's happening. And in terms of innovation and the processes of research and development that are occurring, I'd see things certainly as having changed from the old idea of domination by North America and Western Europe because of the role of China in these processes and the role of innovation and in production and the role of India actually in the manufacture of vaccines and Indian air being so important to the pharmaceutical industry. And that's not the sort of pharmaceutical industry that one certainly used to think about where the innovation and the production occurred in Europe and in North America in a way the rise of China has dispersed that, the capacity of India to engage with the pharmaceutical industry has challenged that. Whether this is scratching the surface, I don't know, one would need to certainly look at the recent data because certainly it does look as though innovation in vaccines is going to produce more profits for many of the big pharma companies. But it's interesting to note on the big pharma the different behavior of AstraZeneca which opted for having the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine as a nonprofit product. Now, in the sort of North-South imaginings and the role of corporations that I had from international development, one could not imagine big pharma sacrificing its profits in a market in which you can clearly make a lot of money very short-term on the products that have been developed. So I can see that the evidence is still that those in a way who are wealthy, those countries, those corporations are continuing to amass the world. But I think with the rise of China with AstraZeneca opting to go for a non-profit approach to it and we are beginning to see changes that one didn't really imagine 25, 30 years ago. Let me comment on that in a couple of ways. One, by the way, I think it's a very good question because it could be asked even if COVID hadn't happened. And that's because the questioner has astutely caught on to what is the big trend in wealth creation which is increasingly wealth creation is driven by innovation and proprietary knowledge, IEIP. And even before COVID came along, the trend was clear that the wealth embodied in intangibles and IEIP today around the world is multiples of what it was. And so rates of return to capital and especially soft capital have gone through the roof. And what COVID has done with the stark example of pharma has simply highlighted that, but we're seeing that in almost every endeavor. We're even seeing it and especially seeing it in the climate change field. Imagine if there's a breakthrough technology in some aspect of addressing climate change. We're going to replay the COVID-19 vaccine story all over again. Second, much as I'd like to celebrate some of the things David said, let's be clear that the Oxford AstraZeneca case is not quite that straightforward. Initially Oxford University or the center there did want to make the vaccine absolutely freely available in the spirit that this was a public-private partnership and indeed was about creating a public good. And one of the major funders, the Gates Foundation, stepped in for reasons that it believed were valid to prevent that. And then there was a self-large public debate and in some senses, the groups were forced into creating a more equitable pricing structure, but they're not giving them away when you look at the reports on how opaque the negotiations with Big Pharma, including AZR, the large price differentials inherit in them, we do not at all have a system in which we could claim that there's a model out there. And I'd include China in it. I think vaccine diplomacy, it's not a new phrase, but it took on meaning because China and India were practicing it and they were not practicing it for altruistic reasons. They were practicing it for geopolitical reasons. So there really isn't a shining example of good behavior out there. We should be thinking about creating and the past I've often said the example I use is the CGIR, International Agricultural Research System, where we create knowledge in the public good and patents are held in the public interest. I think thinking about the CGIR for aspects of global health research makes sense, but we're far from it. So actually, I wanted to come back to this particular question on patents because very quickly the discussion on vaccine distribution in the global South just entered the patents. And I think too quickly because those who work on foreign investment would argue that it's also obvious that just by simply lifting patents on vaccines is going to lead to this big production of increased production in vaccines in the global South. Those who work with foreign investment will argue that actually a sort of tacit knowledge that is passed through, which multinational may not really willing to pass through just be only by lifting patents. And I'm actually a lot of sympathy for that argument. And I wondered, sometimes I felt that this particular debate got too polarized and perhaps at times naive. And I just want you to respond to this because I know you've also worked with foreign investment previously. How would you respond to those who are skeptical of the argument that lifting patents is neither a sufficient condition nor a sufficient necessary condition nor a sufficient condition for getting vaccines produced in the global South? Totally, I think you've put it well, Kunal. It is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. I'd look at it this way. So vaccine distribution in the absence of addressing technology transfer is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to make progress of any kind. It is simply old fashioned charity or it's a jungle out there. So we have to think in terms of technology which is increasingly created not by the private sector taking all the risk. In fact, it's the public sector that de-risked private sector investments in this and asking ourselves, how much of this technology therefore belongs in the public realm, number one, or number two, if it doesn't, can we create a system in which innovation happens everywhere and we create science notes as we've done, as I said, in agriculture so that we tap the scientific potential everywhere. Early on, there were people saying but the manufacturing capacity doesn't exist and you don't understand these are highly complex processes to create vaccines. Turns out more and more countries are turning up South Africa, Senegal, others where the vaccine production capacity and the hygiene and the other standards do exist. And so some of these arguments I think are being made to preserve rents. And so I end up the point if this is a game of global rents, which it is then either you have a sound technology transfer system or you have a sound system to tax rents. We have neither at present. I'm completely okay with saying innovation is driven by monopoly profit. That's the incentive you need for it to happen. Well, in that case, let's not be in this world in which taxes are always ratcheted down and you have tax savings and so on. Then let's tax monopoly rents sensibly and give the public authorities the resources to provide public goods. Thank you, Rohan. I'm going to now move to a question from the audience and it's a very interesting question which I've asked Fatima to respond to. Fatima, the question is, and I think it goes by the debate of the origins of COVID-19. Can biological weapons be developed by using COVID-19 in future wars or conflicts? What are preventive policies, especially perhaps the UN level to prevent such possibilities? What are your thoughts on this? We can't hear you Fatima. Go to unmute yourself, please. Thanks. Yes. Thanks, Kunal. As I was saying, I was looking at the question and was hoping Kunal asked me that particular question because I don't know much about biological weapons and that intersection with COVID-19 especially in terms of future wars or conflicts. Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you now. Just drop the phone for a few seconds. Thanks. Yeah, let me maybe say this. There was a great deal of skepticism in this part of the world. I was in the crowd when COVID struck and the weight of, I would say, religious beliefs, spiritual belief systems, communal solidarity. There was this sense that this was not a pandemic that had anything to do with Africa. And I think we saw just how, to a large extent, at least at the very initial stages of the pandemic, it seemed like much of Africa was spared. So there was a general sense that it was for the first time, this was happening to another part of the world and that Africa that is usually at the sort of front line of all the wars and conflict was this time not affected. So I think we are seeing a kind of shift. I think Matthew was talking about the importance of behavioral change. I think we are seeing that people are dying, the numbers are on a hike, they're going up. And there's definitely a sense that, yes, those countries that are good progress, and I think Senegal's been mentioned as one of those countries that are making progress in terms of innovation need to be encouraged. We don't necessarily have to find solutions in the West. These are not goods and services that have to be exported down to the rest of the world. And I think that I recall when the news brought that Madagascar had found some cure that was indigenous based. It wasn't taking very seriously, but from a Madagascar perspective, this was a cure that they believe was working for them. So I think there's still that kind of a sense of superiority when it comes to science and where scientific goods are sourced. And I think that that's in itself is a problem because there are parts of the world in the global south that could also be encouraged to use native skills and be able to put some solutions on the table. And more of this has to be done, especially since in this part of the world, we can see that we're not investing enough in R&D. If you take Africa for instance, the whole of Africa is producing or contributing to less than 1% of the global scientific goods. And combating this disease will definitely need innovation, will definitely need science, as with many of the other development problems as well. But we do need to kind of shed some of that kind of superiority ways of looking at where solutions can be sourced. We need to find a way of ensuring that the science that we are talking about should actually work, would actually work better from a level playing field, a science that is not indicative or not displaying rather a sense of superiority. Absolutely, and I think the point really is that this problem of not taking science seriously, it cuts across both the global north and global south. We saw that in the case of the US of course, but there are other examples there. And we of course saw that there are also examples that we have from Brazil and many other emerging economies. So this problem of not taking science seriously enough and then often sort of advocating indigenous solutions, so on is not a specific problem in Africa or in the global south, it's a problem we've seen across the board. In fact, David, you've often, you have been reflecting a little bit on these sorts of issues. Maybe if you could just respond to this particular question of the role of science in the discussion on the pandemic and the solutions to it. Yeah, no, I mean, fortunately I haven't been researching on it, but I think it is something that really needs researching as a priority. I will certainly for 2020 and 2021, the way in which science was used and not used and the geography and the way that these different waves have impacted upon whether science has been applied or not. But I think, partly because I was locked down in New Zealand, I started off seeing the pandemic from a very rational perspective where science was used and where policy came in because science could only partly explain what was happening or likely to happen. When I returned to the UK, I was somewhat horrified to find it was chaotic and sometimes the science was being listened to at other times than political advisors were saying, oh no, that would be bad for the economy. And then watching in the USA, the way that a populist president was actually challenging and actually saying that the science was wrong without any scientific basis for that. And we could see that reflected, I mean, the US experience reflected in Brazil, UK maybe in India and then the good performer in New Zealand and Vietnam or Senegal. So these patterns have been pretty complicated. I mean, the one thing that certainly hits me at the moment, I'm trying to understand why West Africa has managed to keep reasonably world clear and we definitely need to look at whether pandemic preparedness because of the 2015 Ebola right had actually prepared West Africa in ways so that although the countries are low income and lower middle income, they actually were ready and there was some state capacity, relatively limited state capacity, but some state capacity so that testing and tracing and thinking about quarantine and some public understanding. But I think that's really important from policy perspective because the sort of science of the pandemic has been tremendous how it's accelerated and at times how public it's been but its application has been so verry around the world and certainly wealthy countries haven't got it right despite their enormous human capital bases, their capacity to innovate and poorer countries haven't got it wrong. Despite the fact they have populations that are much less educated, populations that are much less likely to be able to believe in Western types of science and the scientific systems that dominate. So I think this is really important because if we're trying to improve policy, then it's partly through getting the science listened to much more effectively. And Marty, there's a question I wanted to ask you for the question is- Can I just respond? I wanted to say, I wanted to bring it, the discussion back into the economy and employment and to make a distinction if we can between science and technology, right? Because the poor, the working poor see all the technological systems that have been introduced, right? You know, let's say at the city level, the bus rapid transport or any of the systems for energy, you privatize it, all of these technological systems that come in and now you've got the digital platforms, all of those work for the most part against them, right? So I think we have to remember that the experience of science, so to speak, that the poor face is often the experience of technologies that in the short term, at least for them, are not working particularly well. And from the vantage point of the working poor and the informal economy, you think of how well the digital platforms and the Amazons of the world have done in the pandemic and how we're going to be able to do that. So I think some of the, some of the sort of reaction to science is filtered through the reaction of how technology has left them behind. I agree Martin, but there's a question again with the audience that at the end of the day, when you talk about a better deal for informal workers who as you've absolutely rightly noted that have benefited the most by the pandemic, how can we think about doing that without addressing the vaccine inequality? Now there was still as long as we cannot make sure that we was fully vaccinated in the global south, including informal workers, how can we talk about a better deal? How can we talk about building back better? I think that's a very important question. And the first thing to realize in allocating vaccinations like different countries have done, you have a first group that gets them and often the frontline workers are included in that, right? But informal workers may not be seen as the frontline workers that they actually are. So the street food vendors, the waste pickers who contribute to sanitizing and have to deal with all the COVID waste at great detriment to their health, we do have to prioritize them in the allocation of the vaccinations as frontline workers who cannot work remotely from their home. Now that doesn't address the larger issue of the vaccination apartheid and are we gonna get enough vaccinations out? But I think in the thinking through who should be in that first cohort to get the vaccinations? I think the people who do all the essential, produce all the essential goods and services for us because if nothing else, the COVID crisis has reminded us of the essentials of life, right? I mean, it's food and transport and sanitation. And if we can prioritize these workers in the rollout, I think that is the way to help with recovery because they have to be out and about to work and they are providing essential goods and services. Thank you, Marti. I'm gonna call this panel to a close now. I think it's been a really interesting discussion but I think it's quite clear from all that you've said on the question of inequity and that's stood out so clearly in the discussion here. And the point really is that the pandemic may well go might run its course in the next few years but the inequities if we don't do something about it now, when we have learned so much or how we have had this situation of inequality across country and within countries. Within countries, informal workers, across countries, vaccine distribution, macro imbalances, supporting countries to make the transitional pathway to renewable energy and so on. If you don't do something about that in the next couple of years, unfortunately, we might again be in the situation that we are in the last year or so. And I think that's really important for the international community to think about especially as we come towards copranistics in a couple of months time that we gotta do something about it now. We can't simply think about a situation where this problem that we faced in this last two years comes back again to haunt us. That's a really important message that we should take to the doer especially to the international policy community. So I'm gonna call this panel to close but I want to end by thanking some of my colleagues. Two people in particular. And in fact, I'm gonna call them on the main stage so that everybody can see them. The two individuals that I want to thank especially are Ruby Richardson and Utah Stanholm. They've played an amazing job role in the whole, the way they have this confidence as an organized backstage. And many of you have been dealing with Ruby and Utah all the way through the last three days. It's not easy to run a big conference like this. We had about 200 speakers, so many panels, so many fireside chats, so many coffee rooms and so on. Not easy at all. But the way Utah and Ruby manage everything, making sure with all the usual technology that we had once in a while that things ran so smoothly, which was pretty amazing. Thank you so much, Utah and Ruby. But of course also behind this whole conference is a whole set of people from wider who acted as chairs, moderators, looking after the technology and many other roles backstage. It was a tremendous collective effort, exactly as we try and do in our conference in even wider. And so well done job, wonderful job. And I want to finally thank a super finished company that helped us run this conference platform. I would, I hope that all of you agree it was one of the more interactive conferences you might have been to. And we could do that because you had this fantastic conference platform. And the company's name is virtual data part to mat.fi. I'm sure I got the transition wrong on apologies for that. I don't know whether Yarno can come on stage now. Yarno Warisalo is the CEO of the company. He's been so important for us in this conference and he's been supported by his colleague, Susan Salo, the project manager, Amanda Toukanen, project manager and Rika Heiskanen, account manager. Yarno, I don't know if you can come on stage now because I can see you and your colleagues. If not, we can just thank you and thanks so much for again, the support that you've given us. I have to say that when we thought about this conference we want to do something different. We don't want to have the same kind of conference that we have been having for the last two years on the conference where most even academics presenting papers. We wanted to have interactive sessions. We wanted to make it as much as a typical wider conference and we have it in person. And I would hope that you felt that we, I did our best in trying to create this interactive kind of conference where you got to know new people. You got to listen to some very interesting fireside chats. You got to speak to somebody virtually and so on. So I hope you got that sense what a wider conference is about and hopefully next time, next time we could do it in person. And as you also know, when the wider finishers one conference, the only wider thing's about the next conference. The next conference is going to be taking place hopefully in a hybrid format in Helsinki in May. It'll be on conflict and development and we'll announce of course, again I call papers and everything else in the conference quite reasonably soon. And so we already thinking about the next conference but thanks so much to the audience because it was really so nice to see so much involvement from you through the different sessions that we had the last three days. Sometimes the sessions ran quite late from your point of timing, your time zone perhaps. That's the way we had to do this online conferences. But your participation in the last three days was amazing and thank you so much for that. And hope to see you all in the next wide even wider conference that'll happen in May of next year. Thank you. And thanks so much, sorry. I should also thank Roenton, Mati, Fatima and David for and I know that for some of you it's also quite late or pretty early in the morning. Thank you so much. We'll see you soon. Bye. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.