Addressing Inequality: The First Step Beyond COVID-19 and Towards Sustainability

Abstract

<jats:p>The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted billions of lives across the world and has revealed and worsened the social and economic inequalities that have emerged over the past several decades. As governments consider public health and economic strategies to respond to the crisis, it is critical they also address the weaknesses of their economic and social systems that inhibited their ability to respond comprehensively to the pandemic. These same weaknesses have also undermined efforts to advance equality and sustainability. This paper explores over 30 interventions across the following nine categories of change that hold the potential to address inequality, provide all citizens with access to essential goods and services, and advance progress towards sustainability: (1) Income and wealth transfers to facilitate an equitable increase in purchasing power/disposable income; (2) broadening worker and citizen ownership of the means of production and supply of services, allowing corporate profit-taking to be more equitably distributed; (3) changes in the supply of essential goods and services for more citizens; (4) changes in the demand for more sustainable goods and services desired by people; (5) stabilizing and securing employment and the workforce; (6) reducing the disproportionate power of corporations and the very wealthy on the market and political system through the expansion and enforcement of antitrust law such that the dominance of a few firms in critical sectors no longer prevails; (7) government provision of essential goods and services such as education, healthcare, housing, food, and mobility; (8) a reallocation of government spending between military operations and domestic social needs; and (9) suspending or restructuring debt from emerging and developing countries. Any interventions that focus on growing the economy must also be accompanied by those that offset the resulting compromises to health, safety, and the environment from increasing unsustainable consumption. This paper compares and identifies the interventions that should be considered as an important foundational first step in moving beyond the COVID-19 pandemic and towards sustainability. In this regard, it provides a comprehensive set of strategies that could advance progress towards a component of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 10 to reduce inequality within countries. However, the candidate interventions are also contrasted with all 17 SDGs to reveal potential problem areas/tradeoffs that may need careful attention.</jats:p>

The Outbreak of the COVID-19 Pandemic and its Social Impact on Education: Were Engineering Teachers Ready to Teach Online?

“…When early detection is insufficient, almost all countries across the globe are adopting measures to reduce the spread of the virus [3], such as local lockdowns in areas with high infection rates [4]. However, lockdown and its associated measures on commercial and social activity reduce purchasing power and impoverish the population [5], in addition to its serious effects on social behavior [6]. The great challenge of managing this pandemic is therefore to find the right balance between health, social, and economic dimensions; no easy task when any improvement in one generally worsens the others [7].…”

The COVID-19 lessons learned for business and governance

“…The purpose here is not to prove the superiority or inferiority of any country; it rather emphasizes the over-arching aim of ‘leave no one behind’ and the importance of achieving the globally agreed standards of the United Nation (UN)’s agenda-sustainable development goals (SDG) (Arora and Mishra 2020 ; Ashford et al 2020 ; Barneveld et al 2020 ). As Barneveld et al ( 2020 ) stated, COVID-19 might be a portal to a greener, ecological, sustainable, and collective version of global capitalism, which will help to build a harmonious society, have a holistic stakeholder approach, and remove the pay inequalities or, at least, narrow the pay gap (Eklund and Stern 2020 ).…”

Public Perception of the First Major SARS-Cov-2 Outbreak in the Suceava County, Romania

“…Anxiety generated by the risk of illness, its impact on the cognitive and emotional state of individuals, and the mental health challenges that arise as a result are also addressed extensively in the existing literature [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ]. Last but not least, efforts geared towards identifying the weaknesses of economic and social systems that have inhibited the ability to respond efficiently to the pandemic have also generated valuable insights [ 10 , 19 , 20 ].…”