hankyoreh

Timo Fleckenstein

By Timo Fleckenstein, associate professor of social policy at the London School of Economics

Last year around this time, Europeans were looking forward with excitement to New Year’s Eve parties with family and friends after the festive season with their loved ones — it is a very special time of the year. Entering the New Year with some enthusiasm and New Year’s resolutions, Europeans realized very soon though that 2020 would not be like any year they’d experienced before.

COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China, started spreading in East Asia and eventually arrived on the shores of Europe. Very quickly, European countries saw spiraling case numbers and death tolls, which forced countries across the Continent into months-long, national lockdowns to control the spread of the virus. Still, putting their societies and economies into hibernation did not prevent inconceivable death tolls. Both the UK and Italy, for instance, have exceeded 70,000 coronavirus deaths; and Germany, which is widely considered to have dealt with the pandemic more successfully, has recorded nearly 30,000 deaths.

The European death count suggests, I believe, that South Korea can be very proud of its handling of the pandemic, and it is a great failure of statecraft that European governments failed to learn lessons from Korean crisis management in particular.

Obviously, the pandemic is not over, and we are in the midst of the second wave. European health systems will face great challenges in January, but the successful development of vaccines provides light at the end of the tunnel. But what are the challenges European countries will face in 2021?

The UK started its vaccination program on Dec. 8. A 90-year-old grandmother was the first to receive the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine after the regulator’s approval. This is an important step forward in the fight against the coronavirus, but the mass roll-out of the vaccination will take military-style efforts for many months to reach the tens of millions needed to win the battle against the pandemic.

The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests that vaccination levels of 60 to 70% are needed for an effective protection of the population. In Germany, the health minister hopes to vaccinate 60% of the population by the end of the summer. So, the pandemic will continue to dominate people’s lives for much of 2021. People need to stay alert, and their governments face the dual challenge of maintaining the capacity of their health systems and rolling out vaccination programs at scales we have not seen before. This is not an easy feat.

The pandemic scarred economies, and the economic challenges will not disappear in 2021. Economies will require further support to protect employment and people’s livelihoods. Some jobs will disappear for good, and governments will need to support structural changes in their economies which have been accelerated by the pandemic. This calls for industrial policies supporting forward looking-economic strategies. Certainly, nobody asked for the economic turmoil that COVID-19 caused, but now we should approach the current situation as an opportunity to modernize the foundations of our economic systems for greater economic, environmental, and social sustainability.

Unemployment caused directly by the pandemic and caused by changes in the economic structure following the recovery not only requires adequate social protection for those out of work but also policies that help those whose skills have become obsolete. Not only do greater training efforts benefit job-seekers’ labor market reintegration, they also support businesses which need to adapt to the new economic environment. Ultimately, the entire economy benefits too, as overall labor productivity increases — an imperative in ageing societies that need to make better use of their workforces.

To support economies and societies during the pandemic, major financial efforts had to be made putting public budgets under considerable pressure. The upcoming year will not be easy either – to cope with the remaining challenges of COVID-19 and to put economies onto more sustainable paths. Tax rises might be unavoidable in many countries, and governments should be honest about this. Certainly, increased tax is never popular, and governments fear their peoples’ anger. But policy-makers should trust voters who understand the extraordinary challenges COVID has presented. Here, leadership and an honest public discourse about sharing the burden of the pandemic and protecting the vulnerable in society can make a huge difference. The public has shown a great sense of solidarity, and this solidarity needs to be carried over into the new year.

European and Korean challenges might not be that different, and governments should learn from each other’s efforts for the development of innovative policies for the betterment of their societies. Failure to do so could be very costly, as Europeans’ failure to learn from Korea’s COVID-19 crisis management shows. We see light at the end of the tunnel, yes; but it is still a very long journey before we can return to “normality” – whatever that might be. The months ahead will be crucial, not only for the tackling of the coronavirus but also for the economic and social recovery of our societies.

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