IN A DEFAULT TO ZERO SUM OUTCOMES, THE CARIBBEAN WILL LOSE!

Meanwhile, unfashionable seaside resorts within driving distance of urban centres may make a surprise comeback in popularity.

Atlantic City, near New York and Philadelphia, and Margate, east of London, may once again outshine the foreign, sunnier beaches that long ago eclipsed them.

The staycation trend may fuel the growth of economies already doing relatively well after covid-19, while setting back those doing badly.

By Gilbert Morris

The decline in international travel is hardening (See graphs below). Understanding this is critical to the right conceptualisation of what’s actually happening.  I warned that our plantation economic model premised on a “double wait”

a. For foreign investors

b. For American tourists

Then feverishly dividing the meagre scarps by political tribalism, is not an economic model.

All the 258 pandemics recorded in history have not only shifted entire economic and social paradigms, they also reveal and punish system and structural fragilities, above and beyond the excuse-making voices of politicians, used to gaslighting their populations.

It was only a few weeks ago, public officials were exclaiming that “booking were up”.  But we knew that if we had no protocols on the ground equal to the best practices of the best performing countries in Covid 19, point to booking was a mere demented distraction from reality.

Now underlying structural shifts are taking place, the success and strengths of which will be directly proportional to our economic prospects, and opposite to our lazy presumption that US tourists will soon return; an astonishing precept for an island state economy.

Read about the shifts - forecasted 13 months ago here - in a recent article from the Economist:

From The Economist!

The trend towards domestic holidays will create economic winners and losers:

A.J.P. TAYLOR, a British 20th-century historian, once wistfully noted that the only agents of state a Victorian Briton was likely to meet were the postman and the local policeman.  How times have changed.

The pandemic has brought with it sweeping restrictions on what the state allows individuals to do.  One of the latest is that, from March 29th, modern-day Britons will be fined £5,000 ($6,900) if they go abroad without reasonable excuse—a rule that in effect makes a foreign holiday a criminal offence.

No wonder that this year’s big vacation trend is the “staycation”—to go on holiday in one’s own country.  That will have an uneven economic impact around the world.

Britain is not the only country to impose draconian restrictions on cross-border travel.  America still bans virtually all Europeans from entering the country.  Quarantine rules also have a chilling effect on leisure travellers.

Hong Kong’s system—among the harshest in the world—locks inbound passengers in hotels for 21 days to try and stop holidaymakers importing new variants of the disease.

Such measures, understandably, put a squeeze on leisure travel.  Those with just two or three weeks’ paid leave a year have better things to do with their time than wait around in a quarantine hotel.

At the start of the pandemic, both foreign and domestic travel were destroyed by border closures and travel restrictions.  So low was demand during the first lockdown that Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline by some reckonings, almost shut down completely.

Even so, since last spring domestic travel has been steadily recovering, particularly in America, where lockdown rules have been loosened faster than elsewhere.  According to OAG, a data firm, capacity on American domestic flights at the end of March—measured by the number of seats on all aircraft—was 23% below where it was in January of last year; in Australia it was down by 19%.

Meanwhile, cross-border travel remains in the doldrums.  In China, where domestic-passenger traffic has fully recovered, international travel is 93% below where it was before the pandemic (see chart).

With a third wave of covid-19 cases sweeping through continental Europe, Latin America and India, the trend this summer could well be towards more border restrictions, not fewer.

The trend for more holidays nearer home will affect tourist spots in different ways.  Islands are likely to suffer in favour of places that can be reached by car.

Insular paradises such as Cozumel in Mexico, which used to earn 70% of its GDP from passing cruise ships, and the Bahamas, which formerly generated a similar share of its income from tourism, will take a long time to recover.

Meanwhile, unfashionable seaside resorts within driving distance of urban centres may make a surprise comeback in popularity.  Atlantic City, near New York and Philadelphia, and Margate, east of London, may once again outshine the foreign, sunnier beaches that long ago eclipsed them.

The staycation trend may fuel the growth of economies already doing relatively well after covid-19, while setting back those doing badly.

This was the conclusion of a recent report by Bernstein, a research firm, which estimated the economic impact of 60% of outbound tourism spending being used at home instead.  Their result: China, whose economy is already larger than before the pandemic began, would be the biggest winner.  And the biggest losers?  Greece, Iceland and Portugal, whose economies have already suffered dreadfully over the past year.

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WHY HAS AFRICA FARED SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE REST OF THE WORLD WITH COVID-19?

 AFRICA IS BEST:

MY BROTHER Ntong Victor Sunday HAS PUT ME TO THE QUESTION: WHY HAS AFRICA FARED SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE REST OF THAT WORLD WITH COVID 19?

By:

Gilbert Morris

The African region is the best performing region in the pandemic.  Africa’s total deaths are less than 10% of the United State’s daily deaths.

But what are the structural reasons for Africa’s superb performance?

1. SWIFT ACTION: In February 2020, a number of African nations - like Lesotho - shut down public institutions immediately, whilst implementing social protocols.  Students of strategy should not see this as merely a decision to act quickly.  Instead, it must also be seen as a tactical understanding of the implications of low facilities capacity and financial resources.  Understanding these facts about their status, led African governments to act to prevent even the “best case scenarios”.

2. YOUNG POPULATION - I have written that the future belongs to Africa because its the youngest of all regions of the world.  It turns out that this is also crucial for Covid 19 infections, since (at least initially), Covid 19 attacked the elderly disproportionately to younger persons.  Africa has an added benefit: it does not “warehouse” its elderly.  Africa and Japan - followed by the Caribbean - are the zones in which the elderly enjoy a near sacred deference; though in the Caribbean, we are beginning to copy American and European models of parking the elderly in ‘death barns’.

3. POPULATION DISTRIBUTION - Most African nations are arranged and operate on the “city-village” dynamic.  As such, the elderly tend to live in the village, whilst younger people crowd to cities.  This means the most vulnerable demographic were largely outside the hotspots for Covid 19 infections.

4. COMMUNITY vs. COMMERCIAL HEALTHCARE: Africa - for the most part - does not have large commercial healthcare systems, as in the US and Europe.  It turns out that these commercial systems are not very flexible and could not react swiftly to the onslaught of the virus spread.  They were limited in capacity, manpower and resources.  In Africa, 90% of healthcare is delivered by small clusters of community clinics and a large volunteer sector.  This produces a complex local information ecology, but one which can metabolise the best in formation quickly and adjust immediately at the community prevention and treatment levels.

5. EXPERTISE: Africa has a growing number of experienced medical personnel, (like Dr. Denis Mukwege, Dr. Stella Immanuel and beloved Dr. Evan Atar Adaha), who worked (suffered) through AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, Malaria, Dengue and a host of other maladies.  Those physicians - as in Senegal - are amongst the most seasoned medical professionals in the world.  In fact, they face a conundrum: come together to collect those skills and knowledge or remain in their communities where they are most effective.  What is more important, they must not try to adopt Western Institutional models, which failed miserably in this pandemic.  Even in countries like Taiwan, Japan, South Korea or New Zealand, which have the best performance records outside of Africa, those nations followed the same decentralised script as African nations.

6. LOCAL KNOWLEDGES: My favourite aspect of the Africa pandemic story is the local knowledge.  In Liberia in 2013-15 International Organisations found themselves not only defeated, but found their medical professionals dying in droves in Liberia in the heat of the Ebola outbreak, which spread to Guinea and Sierra Leone.  THEN CAME THE GRANDMOTHERS: quietly, they put the men and boys outdoors on cots under trees and in tents, sanitised the entire homesteads, open the little hovels in which people lived to fresh air, and made everyone stay off the streets, such as they were and cooked soups.  This broke the spread to nearly nil. (I THOUGHT THESE WARRIOR GRANNIES DESERVED THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR 2014 and 2015, but they are forever in my heart).  This exhibition of local knowledge particularly in places like Monrovia and Bensonville, Liberia (one of my favourites), demonstrated a high degree of “social trust”, the same social trust exhibited in Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and South Korea for their nationals governments.

7. CLIMATE: It is now well-established that SAR-CoV2 - the Coronavirus that caused the pandemic Covid 19 retreats in heat and expands in cooler temperatures.  It is also interesting to note that in larger segments of Africa, Covid 19 emerged near the end of their Summer and into the Fall.  As such, by time as Winter fell, in South Africa for example, three months ago - social practices had hardened already and populations had been well-schooled in the proper protocols, which they followed reinforced by local systems.

These are the major reasons for the low count in Africa of both infections and deaths compared to the rest of the world.  I do not doubt there are anomalies in record keeping, categorisation and other statistical integral systems.   However, its been 11 months and likely those anomalies would have collapsed by now.  I am concerned about the new strains in Britain and South Africa - an unusual distribution pattern - because a virulent strain that replicates the ‘superspreader’ would be deadly, not only in Africa, but worldwide.

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The Politics of Pandemics

THIS HEADLINE IS FALSE! 

By Gilbert Morris:

There will be no reckoning: the idea of reckoning is not the arrival of catastrophe.

The calamity is here and deepening absolutely. But this pandemic will not produce any sort of systemic or structural reckoning as a correction for past failures in the political sense.

Governments across the world have adopted an authoritarian stance - from America, to Philippines, to Austria, Italy, Poland and Brazil - in which they assume the citizen-voter’s perspective means nothing!

We ourselves in the Caribbean have known this political authoritarian - know-it-all - stance since independence. Most winning political parties don’t bother about with policy substance, campaigning by merely maligning their opponents.

The Hon. Mia Mottley MP in Barbados - a heroine for her humanity in this Covid 19 era - is potentially the only leader whom citizens voted for rather than against the outgoing administration.

So, there will be no reckoning: governments in the places named will wreck their citizens lives through haphazard policies at a time when 20% of jobs will vanish and 80% of what’s left will pay 50% of pre-Covid 19 wages levels.
There will be no reforms for three cardinal reasons:

1. In crisis cronyocracies seek to protect cronies, not citizens. Lackeys and government form an unimpeachable cabal - as is to be witnessed now in the US - and they claim all must be done to save businesses, premised not on innovation, growth or fair broad prosperity, but rather whatever is needed to maintain chokeholds on their patronised economic sectors!

2. Congenital imaginative laziness: cronyocracies induce creative avoidance and laziness. Ideas have no career in such places.

Our governments in this region will largely await the opening of the US and “wing it” on the hope that there are no explosions in Covid 19 infections.

That is because Cronyocracies cannot respond to crisis in any broad sense. First, because they do not possess or cultivate citizen trust.

Second, because they destory and so lack strategic verve or creative capacity!

3. Citizens who howl at crony government cabals are themselves to blame as well. We have the governments we deserve. Cronyocracies survive because each demented political tribe feeds off of collusive nexus, in hopes of some temporary crumbs from its table of feckless skullduggery!

We are our worst political enemies!

There will be no protests because governments now have the excuse of “Emergency Powers”; which means they can prevent citizens protesting against failures now crippling their lives, even though that failures have been expanding for decades.

This is how pandemics work politically!

Country defaults and company bankruptcies will cascade. Governments will never blame their cranial sclerosis for the carnage; even as they ignore, wilfully, basic sound policy options in preference for reactionary decisions that protect their lackeys...as we are now discovering with Trump and Boris Johnson in the UK!

They will have at the ready - galloping nonsense - excuses, stating the obvious that this - pandemic - has never happened before; despite the fact that the majority of their citizens have been living in Covid 19 conditions for decades.

For companies the only margins available will be those which digitisation brings...but that means not only 20% fewer jobs globally, it means at a time when nations have seen their incomes vanish, the social-safety-net/public assistance will face unprecedented demands.

And starvation level suffering will pervade the world, whilst overfed politicians make mumbling excuses. 

Mark my words!


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