Foresight of Coronavirus (COVID-19) Opportunities for a Better World

Abstract

Throughout history, epidemics gave humans many challenges, but yet also brought with it many visible and hidden opportunities. The Coronavirus (COVID-19) is no except, and in this paper, we foresight the opportunities for a better world that this deadly crisis brings to us. We review different opportunities that this virus and similar recent incidents, like SARS, brought to our life. Then, we pause to visualise through rethinking, redefining and reframing the hidden opportunities inside the (COVID-19) and similar coming problems and challenges. This "think outside of the box" paper create new pathways toward more inspiring economies that would address the key elements we started to miss in our development journey. Integrating future foresight into such problem-solving attempts could create for us more future-informed generations that take participatory actions towards humans' complex challenges with high availability and preparedness. The paper concludes with a proposed framework to exploit the opportunities of such a complex crisis while mitigating its risks. Further studies are highly recommended if we are to see solutions that could save humanity from the coming crisis.

Positioning Informal Skills Learners in TVET System of Nepal

“…In this situation, I applied the concept of field and habitus of Bourdieu. According to Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), -the field is a critical mediation between the practices of those who partake of it and the surrounding social and economic conditions‖ (p. 105). Similarly, according to Swartz (1997), Bourdieu's field means -arenas of production, circulation, and appropriation of goods, services, knowledge, or status, and the competitive positions held by actors in their struggle to accumulate and monopolise these different kinds of capital‖ (as cited in Power, 1999, p. 50).…”

“…There might be multiple reasons for this. One of the major reasons, as mentioned, maybe a lack of economic, social, and cultural capital (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) with those youths who are either unemployed or are, willingly or unwillingly, following informal working and learning path without searching opportunities for the recognition of their skills. Furthermore, the -common sense‖ (Holton, 2000, as cited in Ritzer, 2011, p. 531) of informal skills learners (giving less value to occupational skills and having general education mentality) as habitus excludes them from searching opportunities for skills recognition.…”

“…Habitus acts automatically below the -level of consciousness‖ (Bourdieu, 1990; p. 73) of a human, but it does not mean that it cannot be changed. Habitus can be changed through different conditions (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). When habitus does not fit with the field, the level of consciousness increases (Yang, 2014).…”

The impact of Covid-19 on Turkey’s non-recoverable economic sectors compensating with falling crude oil prices: A computable general equilibrium analysis

“…Although humans face several epidemics and a few of them pandemic outbreak, e.g. Spanish influenza, SARS, MERS, Ebola, swine flu, Zika, and yellow fever (Buheji and Ahmed, 2020; WHO, 2020b), Covid-19 has been causing extraordinary impacts on countries, societies, and economies. Before Covid-19, the world continued to recovery in trade, financial, and political stability (Baldwin and Di Mauro, 2020), but the outbreak suspends this recovery period.…”

“…According to previous pandemic outbreaks, the cost and economic impact of each epidemic was more than 1% of global income (Buheji and Ahmed, 2020). For Covid-19, the reduction in global GDP will fluctuate between 1 and 6% of GDP depending on the number of infected people, fatality rate, missed work and jobs, resilience of economies and societies, changing consumer behavior toward less social activities, or social consumption (Wren-Lewis, 2020).…”