Preface The COVID pandemic may well be remembered as the biggest challenge humanity has faced since the Second World War. Indeed, in many respects it has felt like a war with unprecedented simultaneous health and economic shocks hitting every country and many lives lost. The pandemic has also exposed the horrendous risks humanity faces if it ignores addressing issues related to ‘global public goods’: goods or assets whose benefits and/or costs transcend national borders and jurisdictions and on which, however critical, uncoordinated national action will ultimately fail. Yet the pandemic will also be remembered as transformational. An extraordinary global scientific cooperation has produced several vaccines in less than a year from when the COVID-19 genome was posted on the Internet in January 2020. Under lockdowns, digital technologies, while already extensively in use, have allowed an accelerated shift in the way we work, study, shop, interact and enjoy leisure. While policy responses have varied by government, by and large, the global economic meltdown has been averted. This has come at a considerable economic and societal price, whose full extent will be recognised only in the years to come. The ultimate cost will very much depend on the type of policies governments employ now and the extent of their cooperation. Designing policies for the post COVID world requires both cooperation and a healthy competition of ideas. This debate of ideas must occur now. We can draw inspiration from the remarkable endeavour of the vaccine creation. The speed with which several vaccines have been created – squeezing what would normally be years of research into a few short months – has reminded us of the creative nature of the human spirit as well as the power of competitive-yet-highly-cooperative research across countries and continents. At the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), we are keenly aware of the urgency of the policy challenge. As a novel way of proposing policy options, under our Maryam Forum Initiative we have assembled expert groups of leading academics, policymakers, representatives of the private sector and our LSE students to contribute to and accelerate this global debate. In this unique public-private policy research platform, our expert groups work directly together on the biggest challenges of our time, organised into six work streams. This eBook contains policy assessments and recommendations that the expert groups presented at the virtual Maryam Annual Forum Conference in December 2020 and first published in the LSE School of Public Policy COVID blog series, along with a short video of the conference’s high level policy panel on a new policy paradigm for the post-COVID world. It also includes a Manifesto by our student leaders to world leaders, respectfully demanding a meaningful role in designing policies that directly determine much of their future. A key lesson we draw is that leadership matters more than ever, and not only in government but in business and civil society as well. Another is that science and evidence matter but we need to find new and more inclusive ways to draw on evidence and inform our policy makers and citizens. We are also learning that the young generation, whose economic and labour market prospects have been particularly hit by the pandemic, is eager to have its voice heard more clearly, particularly in areas where policy decisions today irreversibly impact their future. Science-informed inclusive leadership is what we need to tackle the big challenges ahead of us. Our expert groups, led by renowned academics and LSE students, have produced a set of recommendations for the coming period: •
Reforming the way we deal with global emergencies. Existing systems for dealing with global emergencies have struggled to rise to the challenge of the pandemic. Preparing for and dealing with global emergencies requires a multi-disciplinary approach, combining expertise in global health, epidemiology and economics. COVID-19 has shown the need for 3
