The writer is a professor at the University of Toronto
We have invested in building resilience in our financial system, but not in our global health system. That must change. The World Health Organization’s handling of the pandemic has been heavily criticised. The solution is not to cut the WHO — it’s to reinforce it.
What the world needs is a second international organisation to work alongside the WHO with a singular focus on preparedness, response and management of threats to global health. There is already a successful model.
As we confront Covid-19, we are relearning many of the lessons that emerged from the bitter experience of the 2008 financial crisis. Among them: we are more interdependent than ever. The consequences of underinvesting in resilience can be catastrophic. And everything moves faster than we imagined.
The 2008 crisis made clear that we needed to deepen the resilience of the financial sector. Regulators and central bankers worked together on a global basis to impose much higher minimum international standards for capital and liquidity buffers and force banks to come up with detailed operational resilience playbooks and recovery and resolution plans. The private and public sector worked together to strengthen the financial infrastructure and banks raised trillions of dollars in new capital. Transparent peer reviews ensure that the financial centres are living up to their commitments to the new higher standards.
Those reforms were led by a new global institution: the Financial Stability Board. Established in 2009, it works in concert with the World Bank, the IMF and financial regulators to drive, co-ordinate and oversee global efforts to enhance transparency and disclosure, make banks safer, broaden the span of regulation, strengthen financial market infrastructure, and end the problem of financial institutions that are “too big to fail”.
The FSB’s membership includes jurisdictions with systemically important global financial markets, and regional bodies encompass much of the rest of the world. It operates as a global co-ordinator and standard-setter, an early warning system for emerging risks, and holds countries to account. The FSB also brings together different types of financial regulators: central banks, prudential and market conduct regulators, and Treasury departments.
We now need a Health Stability Board with a parallel structure, resources, and authority to support countries in responding to threats to global health. An HSB would benefit from a mandate analogous to the three main functions of the FSB, with committees to focus on each one. A policy committee would agree on global standards. A vulnerabilities committee to assess emerging risks and recommend actions to members. And a standards implementation committee would perform country by country and thematic reviews to see if countries are living up to their commitments to global standards and to assess gaps in preparedness. Where the WHO develops health policy and recommendations based on analysis of global threats, the HSB would administer programmes and support technical capacity building.
The HSB’s agenda should also focus on achieving resilience. To that end it should agree on protocols on timely and transparent information and data-sharing on new diseases and develop international standards for the exchange of crucial supplies during emergencies. It could further support dissemination of scientific knowledge to further the develop treatments and delivery protocols.
A global body could also harmonise the credentialing of healthcare professionals across countries to allow them to practice across countries after appropriate validation, and facilitate the efficient operation of international markets for medical supplies, equipment, and medicines.
Similarly, it could audit and monitor the international inventory of crucial health resources and co-ordinate their deployment in times of need.
Right now, we lack well-resourced, global institutions in healthcare. That means our resistance to diseases is only as strong as that of the most resilient local organisations.
An HSB would amplify the impact of established international agencies, including the WHO, and country ministries of health by acting with the authority and capability to recognise a threat such as Covid-19, and to take steps to pool, analyse and share timely information, and prevent devastating resource shortages and gaps in capabilities. The time has come to develop a Health Stability Board.
Source: Economy - ft.com
