The World Needs to Prevent Post-Pandemic Economic Conflicts, GMF report says

The international agenda should focus on defusing the threat of post-pandemic global economic conflicts in the months ahead, the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) said in a report. 

“While the world is preoccupied with coping with the human toll wrecked by the coronavirus pandemic, the stage is rapidly being set for profound global economic conflicts in the months ahead,” Bruce Stokes, a non-resident transatlantic fellow at the GMS argues in a report. 

Stokes calls for immediate economic measures to be coupled with further recovery efforts to aggravate long-festering policy differences between the US, China, Europe, and Japan.

The GMS argues that this funding will “sow the seeds for future conflict”. 

“The US, Europe, and others need to come up with common guidelines on what foreign investors can and cannot purchase: what is strategic and what is not. If they fail to do so, those with deep pockets—be they Chinese companies or US hedge funds—will play one country off against the other, feeding nationalist, populist backlashes,” Stokes said. 

“There is an immediate and obvious need for a massive economic response to the coronavirus pandemic and the deepening global recession. But the urgency of the immediate should not blind us to inevitable future problems that are within our power to defuse,” Stokes concluded.