The_Economist_USA_-_16_05_2020

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws On the blink—the EU’s bad crisis Covid nostra: crime and the pandemic Starting a business in a slump The Mekong dries up MAY 16TH–22ND 2020 Goodbye globalisation The dangerous lure of self-sufficiency

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws This is us delivering food to those in quarantine. This is us picking up the trash to keep communities clean. This is us driving public buses and trains. This is us volunteering to test new medication. This is us coming back from retirement to work in hospitals and caregiving. This is us celebrating everyone’s efforts with smiles on our faces. So... This is us being scared? We believe times like these make us grow, they make us progress for humanity. www.hyundai.com/worldwide

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UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws Contents The Economist May 16th 2020 3 On the cover The world this week United States 5 A summary of political 19 The jobless market A more nationalistic and 20 Social immobility self-sufficient era beckons. and business news 21 Donald Trump’s taxes It won’t be richer—or safer: Leaders 22 Last call for Irish pubs leader, page 7. Pre-existing 7 The world economy 23 The misrule of law conditions made covid-19’s Goodbye globalisation 24 Lexington Mike blow to world trade even more 8 The EU’s bad crisis damaging, page 57. There is a On the blink Pompeo’s followership limit to how much businesses 10 Escaping the lockdown can prepare for awful First, do no harm The Americas surprises, page 59. Could travel 10 Unemployment 25 Bolivia in limbo zones offer a route to Reopen and shut 26 An amphibious farce in economic recovery? Page 63. 12 Hydropower in Asia Lessons in globalisation, from Water torture Venezuela the small Chinese town that Letters 27 Bello Recalling the makes half of Japan’s coffins: 14 On reopening schools, Chaguan, page 35 golf, religion, St Helena, Shining Path underpants • On the blink—the EU’s bad Briefing Asia crisis By failing to face up to its 15 Europe under strain 29 The shrinking Mekong difficulties, the European Union Searching for meaning 30 A Sino-Indian punch-up only makes them worse: leader, 31 Adultery in Taiwan page 8. The covid-19 pandemic Lexington The secretary 31 South Korea’s new cluster has shown just how little of state is confusing 32 Banyan Militarising Sri European countries agree on the global leadership with purpose of the EU: briefing, barking for his master, Lanka page 15 page 24 China • Covid nostra The pandemic is 33 Mental health providing organised crooks with 34 The missing lama fresh opportunities, page 47 35 Chaguan Coffin town • Starting a business in a slump Middle East & Africa Is now a good time for 36 Covid-19 in Africa entrepreneurs? Schumpeter, 37 Africa’s ballot-dodging page 56 38 Ethiopia’s crisis 38 A family feud in Syria We are working hard to 39 Ramadan television ensure that there is no dis- ruption to print copies of Europe The Economist as a result of 40 France leaves lockdown the coronavirus. But if you 41 Sweden and covid-19 have digital access as part of 41 Counting Macedonians your subscription, then acti- 42 Naval strategy in the Arctic vating it will ensure that you 43 Charlemagne Kraftwerk’s can always read the digital version of the newspaper as Europe well as all of our daily jour- nalism. To do so, visit 1 Contents continues overleaf economist.com/activate

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws 4 Contents The Economist May 16th 2020 Britain Finance & economics 44 How others see us 63 Can travel bubbles work? 45 Toothache in a pandemic 64 Turkey in trouble 46 Migrant care-workers 65 Geopolitics and securities 46 Propping up the economy 66 Crisis-fighting at the ECB 67 Free exchange Could International 47 Crime during the inequality fall? pandemic Science & technology 69 Health data and privacy Climate brief 70 Great apes and covid-19 49 The global impact 71 Wirelessly charging cars 72 Wind-turbine efficiency Business 51 Rewriting Chapter 11 Books & arts 52 America’s profit warning 73 Political warfare 53 European defaulters 74 Stories of south London 53 China’s Adidas 75 Johnson Zoom fatigue 54 Bartleby MBA mauling 76 Home Entertainment 55 Austerity in Silicon Valley 56 Schumpeter Covid and French television dramas 76 Design a board game creative destruction 77 Perspectives Confinement Briefing Economic & financial indicators 57 Globalisation set back 80 Statistics on 42 economies 59 The challenge for Graphic detail business 81 Travel hubs are at high risk of a second covid-19 wave Obituary 82 Eavan Boland, a poet of the ordinary Volume 435 Number 9194 Subscription service The best way to contact our Customer Service Please For our full range of subscription offers, including team is via phone or live chat. You can contact us Published since September 1843 digital only or print and digital bundled, visit: on the below numbers; please check our website to take part in “a severe contest between Economist.com/offers for up to date opening hours. intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance If you are experiencing problems when trying to North America: +1 800 456 6086 PEFC certified obstructing our progress.” subscribe, please visit our Help pages at: Latin America & Mexico: +1 636 449 5702 This copy of The Economist www.economist.com/help for troubleshooting is printed on paper sourced Editorial offices in London and also: advice. from sustainably managed Amsterdam, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, Cairo, forests certified to PEFC Chicago, Johannesburg, Madrid, Mexico City, PEFC/29-31-58 www.pefc.org Moscow, Mumbai, New Delhi, New York, Paris, San Francisco, São Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo, Washington DC © 2020 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. Neither this publication nor any part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of The Economist Newspaper Limited. The Economist (ISSN 0013-0613) is published every week, except for a year-end double issue, by The Economist Newspaper Limited, 750 3rd Avenue, 5th Floor, New York, N Y 10017. The Economist is a registered trademark of The Economist Newspaper Limited. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to The Economist, P.O. Box 46978, St. Louis , MO. 63146-6978, USA. Canada Post publications mail (Canadian distribution) sales agreement no. 40012331. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to The Economist, PO Box 7258 STN A, Toronto, ON M5W 1X9. GST R123236267. Printed by Quad/Graphics, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Economist May 16th 2020 5 The world this week Politics William Barr, America’s at- Beef beef Coronavirus briefs torney-general, astounded China announced a ban on Washington by dropping the imports of meat from four To 6am GMT May 14th 2020 criminal case against Michael abattoirs in Australia, citing Flynn, Donald Trump’s first “food safety”. In unrelated New confirmed cases by area, ’000 national security adviser, who news, Chinese officials are had pleaded guilty to mis- furious that Australia is calling 300 leading the Mueller inquiry. for an international probe into the origins of covid-19. China Europe Other Two advisers to Juan Guaidó, also threatened to impose a who is recognised by scores of tariff of over 80% on Australian 200 democracies as Venezuela’s barley in response to alleged interim president, resigned dumping. US 100 after a failed attempt to topple Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime the regime of Nicolás Maduro. Donald Trump’s administra- 0 minister, set out a path for One of them, Juan Rendón, a tion said work visas given to Mar Apr May easing lockdown in England. Miami-based member of the Chinese journalists would His message has changed from Venezuelan opposition, ad- have to be renewed every 90 Confirmed deaths per 100,000 people “stay at home” to “stay alert”. mitted negotiating a prelimi- days. Previously they were Restrictions will be eased in nary agreement with the Amer- open-ended. Liberals fretted log scale France 100 phases, depending on how ican security firm behind the that America cannot outdo a quickly infections fall. Those botched raid, but says he dictatorship in curbing report- Belgium Spain who can’t work from home are backed away from the plan. ing, and should not want to. Britain urged to return cautiously to Italy their jobs. Northern Ireland, Moisés Escamilla May, a leader China warned France not to Scotland and Wales published of Los Zetas, a Mexican drug sell weapons to Taiwan, which US Sweden 10 their own advice. gang, died in prison of co- is seeking an upgrade of vid-19. He was serving a 37-year French-made warships it Germany Emerging, into the light sentence for crimes, including bought in 1991. France said it France lifted many lockdown beheading 12 people in Yuca- respected its contractual obli- Brazil 1 restrictions. Primary schools tán. Mr Escamilla supplied gations to Taiwan. and nurseries have reopened. cocaine to Cancún. 0 10 20 30 40 50 64 Most people are allowed to go A missile fired by an Iranian Days since one death per 100,000 people back to work, with social dis- Avianca, Colombia’s main naval vessel mistakenly struck tancing. Even hairdressers are airline, filed for bankruptcy an Iranian support ship, killing Sources: Johns Hopkins University CSSE; operating again, but with protection in New York. 19 sailors. UN; The Economist compulsory masks and no Founded in 1919, it claims to be coffee to chat over. the world’s second-oldest The imf agreed to lend Egypt The Chinese city of Wuhan, continuously operating air- $2.8bn to help it cope with the which recently ended a strin- New York state also took line. Its boss blamed covid-19. economic fallout from gent lockdown, recorded its tentative steps towards re- covid-19. “The global shock has first new infections since early opening; three of its regions India’s government said it resulted in a tourism April. South Korea, which had have met seven criteria, such would spend $266bn (10% of standstill, significant capital also largely brought the epi- as a 14-day decline in hospital gdp) on stimulus measures to flight, and a slowdown in demic under control, reported admissions from covid. In diminish the economic dam- remittances,” said the fund. a cluster of new cases linked to Wisconsin the state Supreme age done by its covid-19 lock- Meanwhile, President Abdel- nightclubs in Seoul. Court ruled against the Demo- down. Around 120m Indians Fattah al-Sisi approved cratic governor and overturned have lost their jobs over the changes to Egypt’s state of Lebanon reimposed its lock- an extension to his stay-at- past two months. emergency that grant him and down after a spike in covid-19. home order. the security services more The government has faced Terrorists attacked a maternity power. Human-rights groups widespread protests recently. It Anthony Fauci, an expert on ward in Afghanistan, killing say he has used the pandemic blamed people who ignore infectious diseases who is 24 people including mothers, to tighten his grip. social-distancing rules. advising the White House, told babies, medics and a police- the Senate (via a video link) man. A suicide-bomber killed Ethiopian troops accidentally Brazil recorded its highest that rushing to end lockdowns 32 mourners at a funeral. The shot down a Kenyan plane daily death toll. It is the sixth- before the pandemic has Taliban denied responsibility carrying humanitarian sup- worst affected country by cases ended would result in more for both attacks, but the gov- plies to Somalia, according to a and fatalities. “suffering and death” and do ernment ordered the army to leaked report of the incident. more economic harm in the go back on the offensive, after a Disneyland Shanghai long run. period in which it had sought Three un peacekeepers were reopened for business after to reduce violence. killed when a un convoy in shutting for three months. The The governor of California, northern Mali hit a roadside limited number of visitors Gavin Newsom, said that ballot Indian and Chinese soldiers bomb. The peacekeeping mis- must have a digital health code. papers for November’s elec- brawled at two different spots sion is the un’s most danger- tions would be posted to all along the two countries’ long ous ongoing operation. The White House ordered homes. Far fewer polling sta- and ill-defined border. everyone in the building to tions will open than normal. wear a face mask, except Donald Trump and Mike Pence. For our latest coverage of the virus and its consequences please visit economist.com/ coronavirus or download the Economist app.

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Economist May 16th 2020 6 The world this week Business Saudi Arabia said it would cut Britain scheme’s cost in order to ease mobile Manufacturers. It is the oil production by another 1m the strain on public finances. first increase since mid-2018 barrels a day from next month, GDP, % change on previous quarter (when a tax break on car pur- furthering its effort to shore up Kristalina Georgieva, the head chases ended) and was driven oil prices. Kuwait and the 1 of the imf, warned that the by a surge in sales of commer- United Arab Emirates swiftly outlook for the global cial vehicles. Sales of pas- followed with their own reduc- 0 economy had worsened since senger cars remain subdued. tions. opec’s deal with Russia the fund published a gloomy last month, which ended their -1 scenario just last month. Toyota said it expects operat- abrupt price war and made ing profit for the current record cuts to output, has done -2 pnc Financial, America’s financial year to fall by 80%. little to increase prices. Brent ninth-largest bank, announced The world’s second-biggest crude is trading at around $30 a 2007 09 11 13 15 17 -3 the sale of its 22% stake in carmaker thinks its sales will barrel, half its level in Source: ONS 20 BlackRock. The stake is worth drop to a nine-year low. mid-February. around $17bn. pnc was Black- Britain’s economy was 2% Rock’s biggest shareholder, but While industries in the physi- Saudi Aramco reported that its smaller in the first quarter than as a regional bank it is poten- cal world bear the brunt of net profit had fallen by 25%, in the previous three months, tially exposed to souring loans locked-down economies, those year on year, in the first quar- the fastest rate of contraction in the energy and hospitality in the virtual realm continue to ter, to $16.7bn. The state- since the global financial crisis industries during the pandem- thrive. Tencent, one of the controlled oil company will of 2007-09. However, the ic. Selling its holding bolsters world’s biggest tech conglom- still pay a shareholder divi- figure only captured a glimpse its capital defences. erates, reported a 26% rise, dend, most of which goes to of the chaos caused by year on year, in quarterly sales, the Saudi government. With oil covid-19. Britain’s lockdown Turkey’s financial regulator as the number of subscribers to revenue sinking, the govern- began in late March; the econ- lifted a brief ban on bnp its video service surged to 112m ment is looking at other ways omy was 5.8% smaller in that Paribas, Citigroup and ubs and that for its music service to to raise money, and has tripled month than it was in February. from trading in its currency 43m. It made a profit of 28.9bn the kingdom’s value-added tax Forecasters think the economy market. According to the yuan ($4.1bn) in the quarter. rate to 15%. could shrink by 20-30% in the regulator the banks were second quarter. A study by barred because they had not Getting greedy? Back to Cannery Row academics at the London Busi- settled with their Turkish Uber was reportedly in talks to America officially lost 20.5m ness School found that house- counterparts. But the ban merge Uber Eats, its food- jobs in April. The number for hold spending has plunged by coincided with the lira falling delivery service, with just one month dwarfs the 40-50% during the crisis. to another record low, suggest- Grubhub, a rival in that 8.6m jobs that were lost over ing that the government was market. The combined oper- the whole of 2008 and 2009 The British government trying to prop it up. ations would take a 55% slice of during the financial crisis. The extended its pay-protection the food-delivery industry in unemployment rate has soared plan until October, through Vehicle sales in China rose by America. That might be too to 14.7%, the highest since the which furloughed workers 4.4% last month compared much to swallow for second world war. Steven receive 80% of their wages with April 2019, according to trustbusters in Washington. Mnuchin, the treasury subject to a salary cap. But the the China Association of Auto- secretary, conceded that it government said that in the could hit 25% in the coming summer it would ask compa- months, a level last seen nies to start sharing the during the Depression. Stockmarkets took fright after Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, warned that more stimulus from Congress will be required. The Democrats have proposed an extra $3trn in spending, though their plan is not supported by Republicans. Despite avoiding a prolonged lockdown, the South Korean economy shed almost half a million jobs in April, the most since 1999 at the tail end of the Asian financial crisis. The pandemic has created a “war- time situation” in the econ- omy, said the country’s presi- dent, Moon Jae-in.

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws Leaders 7 Leaders Goodbye globalisation A more nationalistic and self-sufficient era beckons. It won’t be richer—or safer Even before the pandemic, globalisation was in trouble. The largely free outside China, the movement of people, goods and open system of trade that had dominated the world economy capital is not. Consider people first. The Trump administration for decades had been damaged by the financial crash and the is proposing to curtail immigration further, arguing that jobs Sino-American trade war. Now it is reeling from its third body- should go to Americans instead. Other countries are likely to fol- blow in a dozen years as lockdowns have sealed borders and dis- low. Travel is restricted, limiting the scope to find work, inspect rupted commerce (see Briefing). The number of passengers at plants and drum up orders. Some 90% of people live in countries Heathrow has dropped by 97% year-on-year; Mexican car ex- with largely closed borders. Many governments will open up ports fell by 90% in April; 21% of transpacific container-sailings only to countries with similar health protocols: one such “travel in May have been cancelled. As economies reopen, activity will bubble” is mooted to include Australia and New Zealand and, recover, but don’t expect a quick return to a carefree world of un- perhaps, Taiwan and Singapore (see Finance section). The indus- fettered movement and free trade. The pandemic will politicise try is signalling that the disruption to travel will be lasting. Air- travel and migration and entrench a bias towards self-reliance. bus has cut production by a third and Emirates, a symbol of glo- This inward-looking lurch will enfeeble the recovery, leave the balisation, expects no recovery until 2022. economy vulnerable and spread geopolitical instability. Trade will suffer as countries abandon the idea that firms and The world has had several epochs of integration, but the trad- goods are treated equally regardless of where they come from. ing system that emerged in the 1990s went further than ever be- Governments and central banks are asking taxpayers to under- fore. China became the world’s factory and borders opened to write national firms through their stimulus packages, creating a people, goods, capital and information (see Chaguan). After Leh- huge and ongoing incentive to favour them. And the push to man Brothers collapsed in 2008 most banks and some multina- bring supply chains back home in the name of resilience is accel- tional firms pulled back. Trade and foreign investment stagnat- erating. On May 12th Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, told ed relative to gdp, a process this newspaper later called the nation that a new era of economic self-reliance has begun. Ja- slowbalisation. Then came President Donald Trump’s trade pan’s covid-19 stimulus includes subsidies for firms that repatri- wars, which mixed worries about blue-collar jobs and China’s ate factories; European Union officials talk of “strategic autono- autocratic capitalism with a broader agenda of chauvinism and contempt for alliances. At the my” and are creating a fund to buy stakes in moment when the virus first started to spread in firms. America is urging Intel to build plants at Wuhan last year, America’s tariff rate on imports home. Digital trade is thriving but its scale is was back to its highest level since 1993 and both still modest. The sales abroad of Amazon, Apple, America and China had begun to decouple their Facebook and Microsoft are equivalent to just technology industries. 1.3% of world exports. Since January a new wave of disruption has The flow of capital is also suffering, as long- spread westward from Asia. Factory, shop and term investment sinks. Chinese venture-capital office closures have caused demand to tumble and prevented investment in America dropped to $400m in the suppliers from reaching customers. The damage is not univer- first quarter of this year, 60% below its level two years ago. Multi- sal. Food is still getting through, Apple insists it can still make national firms may cut their cross-border investment by a third iPhones and China’s exports have held up so far, buoyed by sales this year. America has just instructed its main federal pension of medical gear. But the overall effect is savage. World goods fund to stop buying Chinese shares, and so far this year countries trade may shrink by 10-30% this year. In the first ten days of May representing 59% of world gdp have tightened their rules on for- exports from South Korea, a trade powerhouse, fell by 46% year- eign investment. As governments try to pay down their new on-year, probably the worst decline since records began in 1967. debts by taxing firms and investors, some countries may be tempted to further restrict the flow of capital across borders. The underlying anarchy of global governance is being ex- posed. France and Britain have squabbled over quarantine rules, It’s lonely out there China is threatening Australia with punitive tariffs for demand- Don’t be fooled that a trading system with an unstable web of na- ing an investigation into the virus’s origins and the White House tional controls will be more humane or safer. Poorer countries remains on the warpath about trade. Despite some instances of will find it harder to catch up and, in the rich world, life will be co-operation during the pandemic, such as the Federal Reserve’s more expensive and less free. The way to make supply chains loans to other central banks, America has been reluctant to act as more resilient is not to domesticate them, which concentrates the world’s leader. Chaos and division at home have damaged its risk and forfeits economies of scale, but to diversify them. More- prestige. China’s secrecy and bullying have confirmed that it is over, a fractured world will make solving global problems harder, unwilling—and unfit—to pick up the mantle. Around the world, including finding a vaccine and securing an economic recovery. public opinion is shifting away from globalisation. People have been disturbed to find that their health depends on a brawl to im- Tragically, this logic is no longer fashionable. Those three port protective equipment and on the migrant workers who body-blows have so wounded the open system of trade that the work in care homes and harvest crops. powerful arguments in its favour are being neglected. Wave goodbye to the greatest era of globalisation—and worry about This is just the start. Although the flow of information is what is going to take its place. 7

8 Leaders UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Economist May 16th 2020 The EU’s bad crisis On the blink By failing to face up to its difficulties, the European Union only makes them worse Seventy years ago this month Robert Schuman, the French prosperous north hates the idea of a “transfer union” that subsi- foreign minister, proposed a European “coal and steel com- dises the needy south—and it hates even more the prospect of munity”. With that humble agreement governing two commod- mutualising any of the poorer members’ debt. Members cannot ities, six war-ravaged countries created a common market that agree on what to do about the erosion of democracy and the rule evolved into the European Union. of law in Hungary and Poland. Even before the first death from covid-19, they struggled to forge common policies on defence, The journey towards integration since then has been bumpy, Russia, migration and much more besides. but it has had a sense of direction. National leaders came and went, the Berlin Wall rose and fell, economic hurricanes struck Ominously, the mechanism of reform is also broken. Ever and blew themselves out. Somehow, the eu muddled through. It since Schuman’s day, the eu has grown by repeatedly amending deepened, building the world’s largest single market, letting its the treaties that govern it. But eu leaders have shied away from people move freely across borders and creating a common cur- treaty change since the plan for a new constitution was thrown rency. It broadened, as 22 states joined the original six, including out by French and Dutch voters in 2005. Leaders have not dared 11 that had suffered for decades under communism. It cemented to put through a significant amendment since 2007. peace and spread prosperity. Today, Europe is a beacon of liberal values and an exemplar of a gentler type of capitalism. Some northern European leaders recognise that they have a problem. In the coming months they are likely to agree to a one- Yet the eu has also lost its way. The pandemic in Europe is not off increase in the eu’s seven-year budget, but the terms are in just an economic crisis, as elsewhere in the world, but is fast be- dispute—the southerners are calling for as much as €1trn-1.5trn coming a political and constitutional crisis, too. This is solvable and they want grants, not loans. There is also a proposal to issue in principle, but the eu’s members cannot agree on what is need- common debt as a token gesture, but that is disputed, too. ed to make their union more resilient, nor on how to bring about reform. Now of all times, when America and China are at logger- If the eu is to thrive, it will have to be a lot more ambitious heads, that is a tragic missed opportunity. than the northerners admit. For a start, if it is not to stagnate it will need to adapt, and this means overcoming the taboo against Belonging to the eu is supposed to bring countries safety in a treaty change. Successful treaty change entails a broader ac- dangerous world. Instead the pandemic is test- ing the bonds of membership, just as the finan- knowledgment that different countries want cial crisis of 2007-09 did (see Briefing). One ex- different things from the union and that such a ample is the single market. This is governed by “multi-speed Europe” can be more resilient strict rules limiting subsidies, but they have than today’s unmet aspirations. That, in turn, been suspended as governments pour €2trn requires the eu to complete projects like the ($2.2trn) into saving businesses from collapse. euro that are vulnerable to shocks because they Half of this was in Germany: a problem if you are are only half-done. a producer based in a country that cannot afford to be so generous, but which must accept German-made goods. Doomsters have often predicted the break-up of the eu or the euro, only to be proved wrong. Another example is the single currency. As countries cushion Muddling through can go on for a long time—especially now that the effects of lockdowns, their debts are rising sharply. Because Britain has shown how painful and expensive divorce would be. governments in the euro zone borrow in a common currency but In the end, though, political systems are judged by their out- must finance themselves, these debts could rise to unsustain- comes. The failure to reform treaties puts a burden on the ecj able levels. The problem is severe in Italy, which was in trouble and the rule of law; German subsidies risk undermining the sin- even before covid-19 struck and had gross public debts of gle market; and economic stagnation will poison the euro. €2.4trn, or 135% of gdp. Italy’s Eurosceptic firebrand, Matteo Sal- vini, is hammering the eu for doing too little to help; his party The Zoom where it happens may yet ride this crisis to power, where it would thrive on creat- So long as the eu remains a conduit for spreading crises, the risk ing outrage and exploiting divisions with far-off Brussels. of collapse will be high. To stiffen their resolve, its leaders should reflect on a more remote anniversary. In June it will be 230 years A third example is the status of eu law. Earlier this month Ger- since the Compromise of 1790, when Alexander Hamilton per- many’s constitutional court questioned whether the European suaded Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to allow the new Court of Justice (ecj) should have ruled that the European Central United States government to assume the debt of the13 individual Bank could, in effect, backstop the euro by buying debt. Sepa- states. Europe does not need to go so far, and a latter-day Hamil- rately, Poland has disputed the ecj’s precedence over its own su- ton has no obvious carrot to offer the rich states (in 1790 the deal preme court. The eu is built on law. If the stresses of the pandem- put America’s new capital city in the South). But there is a stick: if ic weaken the ecj’s foundations, the entire union will shake. Europe’s wobbly members do not get help, the euro and the sin- gle market could eventually implode. European leaders cur- All these problems can be solved with vision, compromise rently negotiating by videoconference must therefore be bold. and reform. Indeed, before the pandemic France’s president, Bigger transfers and significant debt mutualisation would be Emmanuel Macron, warned that the eu needed to fortify itself hard, but as a down payment to avert catastrophe and to set the against a less forgiving world. But such sentiments crumble be- eu on the path to stability, they would be worth it. 7 fore countries’ different views of what the eu should be for. The

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10 Leaders UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Economist May 16th 2020 Escaping the lockdown First, do no harm Governments pinning their hopes on contact-tracing apps should tread carefully Everything happens faster in a crisis. Faced with covid-19, pocket will behave differently from one in a hand. vaccine-makers are cutting as many corners as they safely That could make it hard to calibrate the system—and a mis- can. Anti-viral drugs are being rushed into clinical trials. Even take would have consequences. Too sensitive, and you risk a del- so, it will be months until anything is available. With 297,000 uge of “false positives”: contacts deemed close and significant people recorded dead, the wait is agonising. But caution is cru- that were actually distant and irrelevant. Too forgiving, and gen- cial. Medicine’s history is full of promising treatments that, uine cases of viral transmission will go undetected. when tested, turned out not to work or even to cause harm. Moreover, the apps themselves might change behaviour. An Many governments hope salvation can come sooner, with over-reassuring app could spur people to go out before it is safe. contact-tracing apps on smartphones—even as a row brews over Privacy must be weighed against transparency, for medical rea- Apple’s and Google’s grip on the technology. These apps can be sons as well as for civil liberty. South Korea publishes detailed used to automate the difficult process of tracking down people summaries of cases uncovered by its contact-tracers. A recent who have been in contact with those diagnosed with covid-19, jump in cases was linked to a man who visited gay nightclubs. which is vital for keeping tabs on the virus. The resulting stream of homophobic invective Countries from Bahrain and Bulgaria to Indone- Mobile-internet subscribers could deter others from co-operating with the sia and Iceland have developed such apps. authorities, electronically or otherwise. 2019, % of population They are an attractive idea. Yet contact-trac- The efforts of some governments, including ing apps are also an untested medical invention 0 20 40 60 80 those of Britain, France and Germany, have been that will be introduced without the sort of safe- complicated by Apple and Google, which be- guards that new drugs are subjected to. Inaccu- Europe tween them hold sway over almost every smart- rate information can mislead health officials North America phone on the planet. The firms have made pri- China Asia Pacific Mid. East & N. Africa Sub-Saharan Africa and citizens in ways that can be as harmful as vacy a priority, deeming that users will be any failed drug. Governments should proceed with care. anonymous and information stored mostly on devices rather Coverage is one complication. Epidemiologists reckon that than uploaded to central repositories. That has infuriated many apps might be useful if around 60% of people use them. Yet even officials. Centralisation offers advantages, they say. And in any in Europe, where adoption is highest, only 76% of people have case, why should coders in Silicon Valley overrule decisions mobile-internet subscriptions. That number is lower among the made by medical experts and elected officials? elderly, the most vulnerable to covid-19. A recent survey suggest- As a rule, governments are right to worry about the unac- ed less than half of Americans would use a contact-tracing app. countable power of the tech giants. In this case, though, Google’s Accuracy is an issue, too. Such apps are designed to listen out and Apple’s cautious approach is sensible. In a pandemic, ex- for nearby mobile phones, registering a contact if another device perimenting with novel public-health responses such as mass comes close enough. Yet the strength of the radio signals used to surveillance should be done carefully, in case it subsequently do this is affected by all sorts of things besides distance. Human turns out to have nasty side-effects. With high-tech software, bodies impede transmission, for instance, meaning a phone in a caution is as valuable as it is with pills and potions. 7 Unemployment Reopen and shut Freezing labour markets for too long will cost too much and impede the recovery Never before have governments erected safety-nets as gen- comes has averted suffering, prevented economies from falling erous as those they have created during the pandemic. In apart and ensured public support for social-distancing mea- Britain 7.5m furloughed workers’ wages are being paid in large sures. Yet governments need to prepare an exit strategy not just part by the state, which is spending more on them than it is on from lockdowns, but also from their emergency policies (see Eu- health care. In France the government is topping up the majority rope section). They cannot replace private incomes indefinitely. of private-sector workers’ incomes after their hours were cut. If today’s transfers are maintained for too long, they will be ruin- America has increased unemployment benefits by $600 per per- ously expensive and prevent labour markets from adapting to son per week, almost trebling the average payout. Since March a the new way of life that emerges from the pandemic. staggering 34m or so claims for this kind of support have been made (see United States section). Germany and Japan have Many of today’s schemes reflect the idea that economies need boosted their existing subsidy schemes for furloughed or par- to be placed in deep freeze in order to be revived intact once the tially furloughed workers. crisis subsides. Yet it seems increasingly likely that economies will instead be permanently changed. Consumers may emerge These policies have been indispensable. Replacing lost in- from lockdown with new habits and fears about mixing, spend-1

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UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws 12 Leaders The Economist May 16th 2020 2 ing less on restaurants, cinemas and travel, and spending more late, and the economy will ossify. To find the right path, the most on deliveries, home-improvement and video-streaming. Em- lavish support should be maintained only in industries which ployees may, reasonably, demand higher wages to perform some the government is forcibly keeping closed. Once shops, restau- jobs, such as construction or butchering, which involve working rants and cinemas are allowed to open, the market must decide if elbow-to-elbow with others all day. And industries starved of they have a future. These signals should not be ignored for long. immigrant labour because of border controls may have to entice in more locals. Four in ten American jobs lost in the pandemic Schemes should also encourage flexibility. Idled workers will not return, according to one estimate based on surveys, his- should be allowed to return to their companies part-time, as torical patterns and stockmarket signals. Three in ten gross job Britain this week pledged. America should make more use of losses have already been offset by new hiring. work-sharing schemes, already in place in about half of the The necessary adjustments will not take place while the state states, which, as in Europe, provide benefits on the basis of lost pays workers to wait for their old jobs to return—often on better hours of work, not just lost jobs. This should be paired with un- money than they got before. In America roughly three-quarters employment insurance, though neither scheme should pay so of recipients of unemployment insurance are receiving more much that it discourages seeking full-time work. than they did in work. That blunts the incentive to seek new jobs. And yet cutting support abruptly would leave legions of unem- Finally, governments should help people find new jobs. That ployed workers fending for themselves in brutal conditions, es- means boosting support for training, tearing down barriers to pecially in America with its thin welfare system. opportunity such as unnecessary licensing rules, and cutting Governments thus face a difficult balancing act: withdraw payroll taxes to encourage hiring. As in normal times, govern- support too readily, and many people will suffer; withdraw it too ments must not stand in the way of economic change. They should instead grease its wheels—while offering a helping hand to those who are left behind. 7 Hydropower in Asia Water torture China should tell its neighbours what it is doing on the rivers they share Rivers flow downhill, which in much of Asia means they basket of Vietnam, and depleting the fish stocks that provide the start on the Tibetan plateau before cascading away to the only protein for millions of poor Cambodians. east, west and south. Those steep descents provide the ideal set- ting for hydropower projects. And since Tibet is part of China, China has long resisted any formal commitment to curb its Chinese engineers have been making the most of that potential. construction of dams or to guarantee downstream countries a They have built big dams not only on rivers like the Yellow and minimum allocation of water. It will not even join the Mekong the Yangzi, which flow across China to the Pacific, but also on River Commission, a body intended to help riparian countries others, like the Brahmaputra and the Mekong, which pass resolve water-sharing disputes. The problem is not just that Chi- through several more countries on their way to the sea. na gets huffy about anything that could be construed as foreign interference in its “internal affairs”. The country’s leaders are China has every right to do so. Countries lucky enough to con- also mesmerised by big engineering projects and seldom show trol the sources of big rivers often make use of the water for hy- much concern for the people displaced or disadvantaged by dropower or irrigation before it sloshes away across a border. them, even when the victims are their fellow citizens. So keen is Their neighbours downstream, however, are naturally twitchy. If the countries nearest the China on big dams, in fact, that it is helping source suck up too much of the flow, or even Pakistan build several on the Indus—a river too simply stop silt flowing down or fish swimming small and remote in its Chinese reaches to be up by building dams, the consequences in the worth damming—and is trying to persuade lower reaches of the river can be grim: parched Myanmar to build a huge barrage across the Irra- crops, collapsed fisheries, salty farmland. In the waddy, whose tributaries flow through China best cases, the various riparian countries sign for just a tantalising couple of kilometres. treaties setting out how much water each will guarantee to the next. In the worst, bickering over the flow is a But even if China’s rulers cannot overcome source of constant tension and recrimination. their engineering fetish, they could do plenty more to reassure their neighbours. Sharing data on water levels Tension and recrimination have been the order of the day for routinely, without interruption, would be a good start. During a China and its neighbours, alas. In part, this is because a river like row over a poorly demarcated section of their shared border in the Mekong does not contain enough water to go round. China 2017, China stopped providing India with information about the has already built 11 dams across the main river (never mind its flow of the Brahmaputra that is used to provide flood warnings to tributaries) and has plans for eight more; the downstream states villagers downstream. It took a summit of the two countries’ have built two and are contemplating seven more. Last year, dur- leaders to get the information flowing again. By the same token, ing a drought, the river ran so low that Cambodia had to turn off a downstream countries would love to know when Chinese hydro- big hydropower plant (see Asia section). Even when rainfall is power plants plan to retain or discharge water, to allow farmers normal, the altered flow and diminished siltation are causing and fishermen in the lower reaches time to prepare. And it would saltwater to intrude into the Mekong delta, which is the bread- not hurt China to undertake to alleviate droughts when it can. That would send a flood of gratitude flowing uphill. 7

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws Executive focus 13

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws 14 Letters The Economist May 16th 2020 Is it safe to go back? from all socioeconomic back- wide cultural influence. How- was also one of two places I was dismayed by your leader grounds learn least under ever, there is one area in which unaffected by the Spanish flu calling for schools to reopen stressful conditions. Instead of South Korean women com- of 1918 to 1920, the other being (“Open schools first”, May 2nd). sending them back on the basis pletely dominate: golf. Four Antarctica. Terry Jones of the Department of erroneously extrapolated Korean women—Jin Young Ko, of Zoology at Cambridge scientific conclusions, let us Sung Hyun Park, Sei Young I arrived there in mid- University and his colleagues make wise, informed, safe Kim and Jeon Eun Lee—are in March after two weeks at sea to in Germany studied 3,700 choices on their behalf. the top ten of the Rolex World a world greatly changed. patients with covid-19 and Rankings. The highest placed Myself and dozens of other found no significant difference sabina dosani male, Sungjae Im, is ranked cruising sailboats suddenly in the viral load in patients 23rd. South Korean cultural found ourselves in limbo as among age categories, Consultant child and influence on the world of golf country after country along the including children. The study adolescent psychiatrist is firmly in female hands. traditional sailing routes back reckoned that children may be London to North America or Europe as infectious as adults. Paul james lennox closed their ports. There are Hunter of the Norwich Medical Although you addressed the individuals, couples and fam- School found that closing inequities of returning to the Professor emeritus of history ilies around the world in their schools was one of three of the classroom, the biggest consid- and philosophy of science small floating homes with no most effective measures in eration for American public University of Pittsburgh ports at which to call for water, reducing the transmission rate schools remains funding. fuel, or provisions (apparently of the disease. (Both studies Without additional resources Smells and bells some countries now find have not been peer-reviewed.) to pay for summer schools, There is a basic reason why maritime safety conventions longer hours and shorter holi- virtual worship online will not to be optional). You speculated, moreover, days this is all a pipe dream. replace the traditional visit to a that people working from house of God (“Our Father, who The Saints, however, home with young children are helen lloyd art in cyberspace”, April 11th). welcomed us all with open less productive. I am a consul- Religious rituals have been arms, despite a few, fortunate- tant psychiatrist in a high-risk Director of communications designed to stimulate all five ly false, rumours that covid-19 category for covid-19 and the Alexandria City Public Schools senses. Think of the spectacle had come to the island and mother of primary-school- Alexandria, Virginia of a Catholic mass, the col- some understandable aged children. Because I now ourful religious processions of concerns about the impact on do not have to commute nor do As a 16-year-old pupil, I can tell the Hindus, the adhans of the their own scarce resources. the school-run my productivi- you that children thrive off mosque, the horns of Tibetan ty has gone up. I do home visits social contact. Some will not monasteries, the cake and kennon jones by computer in areas it would comply with social distancing. wine of the Eucharist, the otherwise take me a day to Others will not be able to resist chashni of the Zoroastrians, At sea, on passage from St travel to. Vulnerable children temptations. Even the most the incense of Shinto shrines Helena to the us Virgin Islands often have health issues. Many conscientious will breach the and the ghee poured into the have to care for adults. Their rules. It is not realistic to think Hindu havan, just a few of the The lockdown pants parents may be too scared to we can transform crowded world’s thousands of religious In response to your invitation send them to school. Single common rooms and corridors, rituals that stimulate the for readers to share their parents worry about the logis- with their hugs and hand- senses of their followers. covid-19 experiences (Letters, tics of sending one child to shakes and shared sweets and April 11th) I am a phd student school while others stay home. drinks, into safe spaces. As for the sense of touch, and have evidently been prac- this obviously needs more tising for just such a scenario. Children at home might not harris whitford than one worshipper to be Staying indoors, reading and all be completing worksheets present. It is for this same writing in my underpants all or giving thumbs-up emojis in Sheffield reason that virtual company day has been almost the sole Zoom classrooms, but to sug- meetings are insipid compared agenda on my calendar for over gest they are not learning The teachers at my school have with the real thing. a year now. belies the resourcefulness of had to rethink how they ap- those children and their fam- proach learning. For my part as nawshir mirza Laundry has given rise to ilies. Young children, especial- a 17-year-old, I have had to mixed feelings. I have to do it ly, learn through play and grasp how to use the old Mumbai because there are only so many watching adults. The unusual technology of email. The pairs of underwear. However, situation of the lockdown is shutdown has made school Hail to the Saints there is very little else to add to giving them opportunities to administrators aware of the I read with great interest the machine. A waste of $3 do that much more so than tech disparities among stu- Banyan’s column juxtaposing each time. Every penny counts before. Children are learning dents, which should have been the allure and perceived on a student budget, but at all the time: to exercise obvious before the pandemic. immunity of remote islands in least I can put off shopping for indoors, to negotiate with All said, however, I am very the face of disease with the trousers a bit longer. siblings, to be patient, to be much looking forward to harsh reality of history (April grateful. These virtues won’t be returning to the classroom. 11th). By fortunate happen- nareg seferian measured in exams. stance, I recently had the sabine zednik-hammond pleasure of spending five Arlington, Virginia You concluded that a weeks on St Helena as the rushed return to school may Brussels covid-19 crisis quickly Letters are welcome and should be feel like “a rash experiment deepened. Although perhaps addressed to the Editor at with young lives”. Children Above par best known as the home to The Economist, The Adelphi Building, Your special report on South Napoleon in exile, St Helena 1-11 John Adam Street, London WC2N 6HT Korea (April 11th) had much to Email: [email protected] say, mostly negative, about the More letters are available at: plight of women in the country Economist.com/letters as well as its growing world-

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Economist May 16th 2020 15 Briefing Europe under strain some countries had themselves to blame for their financial troubles, Antonio Costa, the prime minister of Portugal, issued a fierce response. “This speech is disgust- ing,” he said. “Disgusting.” The whole world is struggling with co- vid-19. But in the eu, the pandemic has trig- gered a concatenation of crises. What start- ed as a health crisis became an economic crisis, then a political crisis, then a finan- cial crisis, says Pepijn Bergsen of Chatham House, a think-tank. Now it risks becoming a constitutional one, after Germany’s con- stitutional court challenged the legal su- premacy of the European Court of Justice earlier this month. In its current form, the eu amplifies cri- ses rather than solving them. Sticking with the current system is untenable. Altering it will be difficult. Fundamentally different expectations of the eu divide Europeans. At the heart of these disagreements is an in- ability to find an answer to a decades-old question: what is the eu actually for? Searching for meaning There’s something evolving It began as a peace project. On May 9th1950, The covid-19 pandemic has shown just how little European countries agree on the five years after the second world war ended purpose of the eu in Europe, Robert Schuman, then France’s foreign minister, unveiled a scheme to In january brussels was an optimistic foreign-policy chief—reintroduced them make war between his country and West place. The European Union (eu) had sur- in chaos. Commuters were stranded at Po- Germany “not merely unthinkable, but ma- vived a decade that included the near col- land’s borders with both Lithuania and terially impossible”. His method? Combin- lapse of the bloc’s currency, a refugee crisis Germany, some of them for days. ing the coal- and steel-production capabil- and its second-largest economy, Britain, ities of the two countries, along with any voting to leave. For the first time in years, The bloc’s gdp is expected to drop by other willing European nations, and put- officials had time to think of the future 7.4% this year, compared with a 4.3% fall in ting them under the control of an indepen- rather than clear up the messes of the past. 2009, the worst year of the financial crisis. dent authority. Two years later the Euro- Then 120,000 people died. Investors betting on the collapse of the pean Coal and Steel Community, the euro have started to drive up Italy’s borrow- forebear of the eu, was born. Sweeping lockdowns confined citizens ing costs. European politicians have at- to their homes, in Paris and Warsaw alike. A tacked each other with a ferocity not seen Prosperity soon followed, with Euro- bloc that prided itself on removing bor- since the euro crisis, when the bloc’s future pean co-operation framed as a path to rich- ders—“the scars of history” in the words of was last in doubt. After Wopke Hoekstra, es thanks to free movement of goods, Josep Borrell, the European Commission’s the Dutch finance minister, suggested workers, capital and services in the origi- nal club of six countries (as well as France and West Germany it included Italy, Bel- gium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg). The small club first expanded to its north, with Ireland, Denmark and Britain joining. Then in the1980s the young democracies in southern Europe, such as Spain, Portugal and Greece were included. By the mid-2000s, much of eastern Europe had signed up, too. Building up the bloc was a piecemeal process, as Schuman had envisaged, argu- ing that “Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan.” Slowly and quietly, bureaucrats in Brussels and judges in European courts disassembled barriers to trade and harmonised regula- tions. In 1992 the single market pro- gramme, backed by Margaret Thatcher, the generally Eurosceptic British prime minis- ter, made trade even easier. It took two con- stitutional earthquakes for European vot- ers to notice that the foundations of their1

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws 16 Briefing Europe under strain The Economist May 16th 2020 2 governments had shifted: the introduction ish mep. Collapsing southern European poorer members, fiscal union—considered of the euro and the expansion of the bloc to economies would wreck the cozy eco- a step too far when the euro was intro- include former communist countries in nomic settlement that has been so benefi- duced—would eventually have to follow. eastern Europe. cial to the likes of Germany and the Nether- What the euro’s designers did not envisage These changes had visible effects. A lands. The euro has enabled Germany to was that Europe’s leaders would balk, re- mass movement of people from central run huge trade surpluses without being peatedly, at that deeper integration, thus and eastern Europe to richer countries in hindered by an appreciating currency. Fis- endangering the currency’s survival. the west made clear that freedom of move- cal transfers from north to south would be ment was not just a nebulous concept, but a small price to pay. Without such a com- They say the next big thing is here one which affected people’s daily lives; prehensive recovery fund, the single mar- Economic integration has failed to provide mostly for good but, in the perception of ket risks entrenching inequality rather the eu with a compelling common pur- some, for ill. In 2010 the euro-zone crisis than spreading wealth. pose. Other, less tangible goals have taken was a potent reminder that the fate of the on greater importance. A Europe based on currency in a Belgian’s wallet was in part However this plan was staunchly op- shared values looms large in the imagina- determined by the actions of governments posed by small, rich, mostly northern tion of Europhiles. Today Eurocrats are in Athens, Rome and Madrid. European countries, several of which have also had more likely to discuss ways of protecting voters became painfully aware of the eu’s slightly fewer covid-related deaths than and promoting the “European way of life” price, and that led to increasingly anxious others (see map). The Netherlands, De- than the merits of close economic ties. questions about its purpose. mark and Sweden all pooh-poohed the idea. The Dutch government offered a one- This view taps into a long memory of The world keeps revolving off grant of €1bn, about a tenth of a percent the eu as a civilising force. “Spain is the Today a common goal is hard to find. The of the sum demanded by the Spanish gov- problem, Europe is the solution,” declared challenges that the eu now faces—on fiscal ernment, as a gesture of goodwill. José Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish writer, in policy, foreign policy, defence and migra- 1910. If his phrase has become a cliché of his tion—cut to the heart of sovereignty. The German government, meanwhile, country’s political life it is because after the Dreams of the eu as a superpower require a will stretch only to modest grants, arguing end of the long dictatorship of Francisco strategic unity not easy to find among a 27- that any eu recovery fund should consist Franco in 1975, most Spaniards wanted member bloc that stretches from Lisbon to mainly of loans. In the middle, the Euro- their country to become a normal Euro- Tallinn. Even attempts to turn the eu into pean Commission is tasked with devising a pean democracy. It is a view shared in Ger- an advocate of liberal democratic values scheme that keeps both sides happy. It will many. “German problems can only be fail to inspire everyone. In the past, dis- propose a mixture of grants and loans to in- solved under a European roof,” declared agreements on direction could be settled debted countries, paid for out of the eu’s Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first by standing still. Now, the forces that held budget. Countries will spend much of the chancellor, in 1962. the eu together risk pulling it apart. year haggling over it. However, this view is not universal. Take the single market. According to the The argument over how to respond to Memories of authoritarian regimes may European Commission, allowing the free the economic crisis reveals another fault- linger in the politics of most eu states. Yet movement of labour, capital, services and line that has long run through the eu: a no such memory concentrates minds in, workers adds between 8% and 9% to the shared currency but no shared spending say, Sweden, meaning that supranational eu’s collective gdp. Because all companies policy. This was originally a feature of the shackles can be seen as an affront to sover- in the eu can access each other’s markets, euro’s design, not a bug, argues Jan Techau eignty rather than a necessary constraint the bloc has strict rules on how much help of the German Marshall Fund, a think-tank. on the state. a government can give to domestic compa- The euro’s creators “wanted this tension to nies. When covid-19 hit, the commission be there”, he says. Given the obvious pro- Shared values matter to a continent loosened them, allowing governments to blems of running a currency without a uni- coming to terms with its past. They also hand out cash to industries they feared fied budget or transfers between richer and matter for a continent that increasingly1 might go under. Such aid, in the form of guarantees or wage supplements, has European Union Finland Covid-19, confirmed deaths amounted to €1.9trn ($2trn) so far. German Ireland Per 100,000 population guarantees for German businesses account for just over half of this figure. Norway To 6am GMT May 14th 2020 Once a reasonably level playing field, Sweden Est. 1 4 8 16 32 64 the single market is now lopsided. In the downturn to come, Spain and Italy will en- Lat. Sources: Johns Hopkins dure deeper recessions than Germany, University CSSE; PHE/NHS leaving them even less financial muscle to help domestic businesses. Both the Span- Denmark Lith. ish and Italian economies will contract by Neth. Russia more than 9% this year, predicts the Euro- pean Commission. By contrast, Germany’s Belarus gdp will fall by 6.5%. Not for the first time in the bloc’s history, the burden falls heavi- Britain Poland est on those least able to bear it. Belgium Germany Ukraine To rebalance the eu’s economy, an alli- Czech ance of countries led by Spain suggested Lux. Rep. Slovakia grants totalling €1.5trn, paid for with debt backed collectively by the eu as a whole. It France Swi. Austria Hungary Romania would be in the self-interest of all eu coun- tries, argues Luis Garicano, a liberal Span- Italy Croatia Bulgaria Portugal Slovenia Spain Turkey Greece Cyprus Malta

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Economist May 16th 2020 Briefing Europe under strain 17 2 tries to influence the world, portraying it- its independent court. Eurocrats have painful memories of past self as a global power. Ivan Krastev, a politi- These warring judges have also called referendums. A fully fledged “constitu- cal scientist and the bloc’s most impish tion” was rejected by French and Dutch vot- critic, sees two paths for the eu. Either it into question the future of actions taken by ers in 2005. Indeed deeper ties in Europe becomes more of a “mission”, going forth the ecb to stem the financial effects of the have always been controversial. In 1992 and evangelising European values globally, covid-19 crisis. A €750bn bond-buying pro- French voters agreed by just 51% to adopt or it becomes a “monastery” and preaches gramme launched in March by the ecb saw the Maastricht treaty, which led to the only to Europeans within its precincts. the central bank hoover up debt from Italy monetary union. The idea of a European mission has its and Spain, in a bid to dampen the effects of fair share of supporters. Ursula von der the pandemic. As a result, Italy and Spain Bold federal steps would help. But a Leyen, the new president of the European can easily borrow on the open market. This sturdier constitution would result in even Commission, said it would be a more “geo- contrasts sharply with the start of the euro more fractious politics. If pushed, German political” body under her leadership. En- crisis, when the euro zone’s future seemed officials will insist that they have no funda- rico Letta, a former prime minister of Italy to hang in the balance every time Italy held mental objection to a mutualisation of and now the head of the Jacques Delors In- a bond auction. debt. At the same time they insist it would stitute, a think-tank, argues that the eu have to be accompanied by a correspond- should aim to become a third superpower However, the ecb has created moral ing centralisation of fiscal power over how between America and China. hazard. Bold action by the central bank has national governments spend, which is led to political complacency among the likely to upset many European govern- I’ve seen it before, and I’ll see it again eu’s northern states. It has thus relieved ments. For countries in southern Europe, Indeed, the eu already has immense regu- pressure on Europe’s leaders to take tricky fiscal union is seen as freedom; for Ger- latory clout. It sets global standards on decisions, such as whether they should many it is seen as tighter control. everything from privacy to processing provide southern Europe with enough fis- chemicals to environmental rules. Rather cal power to get out of the crisis. Germany Just little bits of history repeating than use different standards across the and the Netherlands once railed against Either way resentment is brewing, particu- globe, businesses obey the eu’s (usually the ecb’s largesse; now they are among its larly in southern Europe. Italians have more stringent) regulations to save costs, a beneficiaries, delaying difficult choices in been among the most communitaire of phenomenon known as “the Brussels ef- the knowledge that the bank will continue Europeans. In a survey for the commission fect”. Translating this into more tangible to keep the bloc afloat. For a project that in 2000, just before the euro became legal forms of power is difficult. Superpowers seems to move decisively only when in per- tender, only 9% were against eu member- require strategic unity, which may be hard il, this is a problem. ship, compared with an eu average of 14%.  to build in a club that has very different But by May 7th almost 44% were ready to views on Russia, to give just one example. The result is that a constitutional reck- quit. “Italians feel betrayed,” says Gianluca oning has never seemed more necessary, Borrelli of Termometro Politico, the insti- If the eu rolls back its global ambitions yet it has never felt less likely. Hard ques- tute that conducted the latest poll. Apoca- and goes down the second route suggested tions proliferate: whether or not the eu will lyptic rhetoric flows from southern Eu- by Mr Krastev—becoming a monastery—it pursue deeper integration, what role the rope’s leaders. Portugal’s prime minister, will have to deal with a war among the bloc will play in global politics, and so on. Mr Costa, declared: “Either the eu does monks. Any claim that the eu is united in Even dilemmas unimaginable a decade what needs to be done or it will end.” its support for liberal democratic norms is ago, such as whether the eu is only for lib- disproven by the fact that Poland and Hun- eral democracies, need to be cleared up. A more complacent view exists in the gary have steadily eroded the rule of law— eu’s northern capitals, particularly in Ber- and yet they remain members of the club. Although Britain’s chaotic departure lin. When it comes to common debt, a feel- Poland’s government has tried to nobble its was not exactly a tempting advertisement ing exists that Spain, Italy and France— supreme court. Hungary’s prime minister, for the joys of leaving the bloc, it is still which has supported the two southern Viktor Orban, has subverted or sidelined likely that big changes to the eu’s rules countries throughout—are trying it on, us- most of his country’s checks and balances would lead to a slew of tricky plebiscites. ing the crisis to mask opportunism. “How over the past decade, and seized on the do you distinguish between genuine ne- pandemic as an excuse to rule by decree in- cessity and political opportunity?” asks definitely. Meanwhile, cronies of his ruling one ambassador from a northern European party are gorging on aid from Brussels. country. In this view a compromise will be found; yet another chapter in the eu’s long Even previously unchallenged parts of history of muddling through. the eu’s dogma, such as its legal order, look more shaky. In May Germany’s constitu- According to an old joke, economists tional court ruled that the European Court have predicted nine of the past five reces- of Justice in Luxembourg was acting be- sions. Those predicting the demise of the yond its authority in the way it ruled on the eu may look similarly foolish. The bloc, its European Central Bank’s bond-buying in currency and its institutions are so central 2018. In effect, the German court declared to much of European political life that un- that since the eu is not a federal state, na- picking them all would require a level of tional courts can decide whether the ecj wanton destruction that not even the eu’s has gone beyond its remit. The ecj dis- harshest critics have advocated. However agreed, leaving the two courts jostling for after a decade of crises survivor bias afflicts supremacy. The European Commission is the eu’s supporters and fresh thinking is examining whether to launch sanctions urgently needed. An uncomfortable jour- against Berlin for breaking the eu’s trea- ney is justified if the destination is worth- ties. (The ecj would have the final say.) A bi- while. But without a clear answer to the zarre situation looms in which the German question of what Europe stands for, the government is criticised for the actions of next decade or so will resemble a rather pointless ride. 7

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UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws United States The Economist May 16th 2020 19 Welfare and work generous, millions of people have not had their money. Preliminary data analysed by The jobless market The Economist suggest that up to 15m Amer- icans who applied for ui in March and April Unemployment is at levels last seen during the Great Depression. had not received money by the start of May. The welfare system is creaking Compounding these administrative Eileen sheppard has been cutting hair So rapid a rise in unemployment would problems are looming political battles. The professionally for 20 years. Now 39, she stress any country’s ui system. Some, such $600 booster expires at the end of July. lives in a small town in upstate New York, as Britain’s, have coped surprisingly well. Worries that America’s ui system is too and lost her livelihood when Andrew Cu- America’s has not. The federal government generous and discourages work are grow- omo, the state’s governor, shut down hair funds the administration of these benefits ing on the right. salons and other personal-care businesses through grants tied in part to how much on March 20th. Millions have found them- each state paid in ui claims in the previous Like much else in America, ui is less one selves in a similar position, pushing Amer- year. America’s long economic expansion system than dozens, held together with ica’s unemployment rate to an 80-year high left its system woefully underfunded. So some federal glue. It is intended to replace (see left-side chart on next page). As else- although the weekly $600 top-up that Con- a share of lost wages while a recipient looks where, New York’s computer systems could gress approved in late March is nominally for work. Democrat-run states in the north- not handle the rush of applications for un- east tend to be more generous than Repub- employment insurance (ui). Ms Sheppard Also in this section lican-run southern states, but overall, pre- spent hours each day refreshing the site, pandemic America had perhaps the rich which kept crashing and losing the infor- 20 Social mobility world’s stingiest system. The average mation she had entered, while trying to payout in 2019 was equivalent to about care for her son, who was out of school (her 21 Donald Trump’s taxes 40% of previous earnings. Tough rules en- husband was at his job hours away). She sured that only those diligently seeking eventually managed to apply, but nearly 22 Irish pubs work would be granted welfare, and two months after she lost her job she has payouts were strictly time-limited. received no money—just a letter with fur- 23 The misrule of law ther application instructions. Now America may have the world’s 24 Lexington: Mike Pompeo most generous system. Work-search re- quirements have been waived—rightly so, since people should be at home rather than pounding the pavement—and states have extended time limits on payouts. Workers deemed ineligible for ordinary ui, because1

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws 20 United States The Economist May 16th 2020 2 they are self-employed, business owners mand. With such programmes, explains Social mobility or have an irregular work history, can now Annelies Goger of the Brookings Institu- apply for benefits. And the extra $600 a tion, a think-tank, workers “don’t get the Is zipcode destiny? week means that some can expect a hefty message that they’ve lost their jobs. They pay rise (see right-side chart). Goldman get the message that things are on pause.” WASHINGTON, DC Sachs, a bank, estimates that three-quar- Just over half of American states have ters of laid-off workers are in line to receive short-term-work programmes, with ui Two leading economists disagree about benefits that exceed their former wage. covering the lost hours, but take-up had the flagging American Dream Payments may be slow to arrive, but work- been low. Since the pandemic began ers will in theory receive back-pay when take-up has increased, and Michigan has Most americans worry that they live their claims are finally processed. expanded its programme; workers in the in an age of reduced social mobility. The creation of some odd economic in- schemes remain eligible for supplemental Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, has done centives was, to an extent, unavoidable. benefits. Katharine Abraham at the Univer- The states’ ui systems are archaic, relying sity of Maryland points to research sug- as much as anyone to provide empirical on programming languages devised as gesting that merely raising employers’ long ago as 1959, making it impossible to awareness of such programmes could heft for that malaise. Armed with data from tailor payouts more sharply. Hence the flat make a big difference. $600-a-week boost, which is, roughly, the nearly all the tax returns filed in America difference between the national average Another option would be to prolong the weekly wage in 2019 ($970) and the average more generous unemployment system for decades, he and his co-authors have unemployment payout that year ($370). past July. Michael Bennet, a Democratic Giving some workers more money than senator from Colorado, has proposed ex- pieced together an astonishing series of they had earned in a job may not be the best tending the current level of federal ui until use of public resources, but the people who the public-health emergency ends, and findings: that absolute mobility (the benefit most are likely to be among Ameri- then gradually reducing benefits. But at ca’s poorest. And the money thus “wasted” some point such payouts will hinder the chance that a child will go on to earn more (about $80bn, on the highly unrealistic as- economic recovery, in particular the reallo- sumption that 30m workers are on the pro- cation of workers from declining sectors to than their parents) has dropped from 90%, gramme for an entire year) would amount up-and-coming ones. Some research has to just 3% of America’s total fiscal stimulus. indicated that a reduction in unemploy- a near certainty, to 50%, a coin-toss; that ment benefits in 2014-15 helped kick-start Back to work America’s pre-pandemic jobs boom. the gap in life-expectancy between rich Anyone hoping to game the benefits sys- tem is likely to be disappointed. Regula- Most probably, the unemployment sys- and poor has widened even as that between tions are designed to foil people who quit a tem will return to its pre-pandemic ways job in order to pick up an unemployment sooner rather than later. Lindsey Graham, a blacks and whites has narrowed; and that cheque. Having to quarantine because of Republican senator, has said the $600-a- household illness or care for a dependant week programme would be extended “over although the chances of upward mobility with covid-19 will not cause anyone to lose our dead bodies”. The economy is reopen- their ui; refusing to work out of a general ing and bosses are looking for workers. differ greatly from one neighbourhood to fear of illness will. Some reopening states, Congressional Republicans have pressed including Iowa, Ohio and Texas, encourage for broader protections for employers, employers to report workers who refuse a similar to those given by President Donald job offer, disqualifying them from benefits. Trump to the meat industry, which would shield them from liability for covid-related Some economists want the government deaths provided they follow minimum fed- to do more to encourage employers to re- eral safety standards. Democrats may re- duce working hours rather than laying peo- luctantly fall in line in exchange for more ple off—especially useful when businesses state and local aid in the next round of re- are allowed to reopen but face weak de- lief. Before long, many American workers will face unpalatable choices. 7 the next, in nearly every part of America the path for black boys is steeper. Love of labour lost? Mr Chetty has also compiled evidence United States Average unemployment-insurance benefit that mobility (or immobility) depends a lot By industry/occupation, 2019-20, $ per week on the types of neighbourhood that Ameri- Unemployment rate*, % State Federal ($600) cans grow up in. Re-analysing the Moving 25 0 300 600 900 1,200 1,500 to Opportunity (mto) experiment, which Leisure services Average randomly assigned vouchers to poor fam- weekly 20 Retail sales earnings ilies in five American cities to live in less Average of all 15 industries† poor places, he and his colleagues found Education Health dramatic effects for children who moved 10 while young: a 32% higher chance of at- tending college and 31% higher earnings. 5 His research consortium has ranked neigh- Manufacturing bourhoods according to their chances of 0 Construction propelling poor children upwards, pub- 1890 1920 40 60 80 2000 20 Finance lishing an online Opportunity Atlas. A new Sources: Census Bureau; Bureau of Labour Statistics; Goldman Sachs *Yearly before 1948, monthly from 1948 †Layoff-weighted mto-style experiment in Seattle is investi- gating these dynamics in real time. 1

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Economist May 16th 2020 United States 21 2 “It’s like Rousseau [in ‘The Social Con- Donald Trump’s taxes tract’]: ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.’ We just remove the chain of On the money neighbourhood. And it’s not that simple,” says James Heckman, an economist at the NEW YORK University of Chicago, who has grown criti- cal of the research and the implications The Supreme Court may issue split decisions on the president’s financial records drawn from it. Mr Heckman, who won a Nobel prize for work on teasing out cause The separation of powers, the foun- Bank, two of Mr Trump’s lenders, and Ma- and effect from messy, real-world data, ders’ bulwark against tyranny, is not zars usa, his accountant. The Oversight thinks there is more statistical uncertainty what it might seem. As James Madison ex- Committee had demanded documents to in the neighbourhood-mobility findings plained in the Federalist Papers No. 47, the help it consider revising government eth- than is widely recognised. A working paper idea is not to keep the legislative, executive ics laws. The Intelligence and Financial by Magne Mogstad, another economist at and judicial departments “absolutely sepa- Services Committees said they wanted to the University of Chicago, and his col- rate and distinct”. Rather, Madison wrote, investigate money-laundering and foreign leagues argues that the “noise”, or random each must exercise a measure of “control” interference in the 2016 election. fluctuation, in Mr Chetty’s data means “it is or “agency” over its fellow branches. Nego- not possible to draw firm conclusions tiating the overlapping portions of the Patrick Strawbridge, Mr Trump’s lawyer, about which counties in the United States Venn diagram has often fallen to the judi- described the House efforts as a “dragnet”. have high or low values” of upward mobil- ciary, as it did on May 12th, when the Su- He seemed to raise the eyebrows of Chief ity from the poorest 25% of households. preme Court took up two challenges to Justice John Roberts, though, when he cast Mr Heckman acknowledges that there President Donald Trump’s quest to keep his doubt on all congressional oversight of are clear differences in mobility according taxes and other financial records secret. presidents. “Quite frankly,” Mr Strawbridge to neighbourhood. But the ultimate drivers said, “the House has limited powers to reg- could lie in family structure, parenting Mr Trump is the first president since ulate the presidency itself.” Jeff Wall, sup- habits, exposure to crime or the quality of Richard Nixon to refuse to share at least porting Mr Trump from the Department of schooling. All these are difficult to derive some tax information with the American Justice, added that the subpoenas were de- from American tax-return data. people. But in April 2019, with the Demo- signed to “undermine the president” and Pundits take the research on “neigh- crats back in control of the House of Repre- the House had not “even come close” to ex- bourhood effects” as evidence that “zip- sentatives, three congressional commit- plaining why it needs the documents. code is destiny”. Mr Heckman bristles at tees subpoenaed years of papers from Mr that. It overlooks the fact that Asians and Trump’s banks and his accounting firm. A The House’s lawyer, Douglas Letter, black women do fairly well in mobility rel- few months later Cyrus Vance, Manhattan’s seemed to have precedent on his side. In ative to whites. “It diverts attention away district attorney, sought similar records for 1927 the court observed that the “power to from other plausible explanations for why a grand-jury investigation into Mr Trump’s secure needed information…has long been African-Americans are not doing well. Put alleged hush-money payoffs to an adult treated as an attribute of the power to legis- discrimination on the table…but family film star and a Playboy model before the late.” And in 1974 it unanimously ordered structure is the one thing that is just off the election in 2016. Lower courts rejected Mr Nixon to comply with a subpoena for his table in American society,” he says. Trump’s pleas to block the subpoenas, leav- White House tapes. But when pressed to That topic has a history of descending ing the nine justices with the final say. identify a limit on Congress’s subpoena into ugly spats about the personal culpabil- power, Mr Letter faltered. Justice Samuel ity of the poor, which may ward off social The first pair of cases, argued by tele- Alito, one of the court’s most skilful ques- scientists. Mr Heckman sees his own re- phone (the court is not meeting in person tioners, backed him into a Socratic corner. search—tracking long-term outcomes for during the pandemic), concerned House There is “really no protection”, he asked, children and parents randomly assigned to subpoenas to Capital One and Deutsche “preventing the harassment of a presi-1 a high-quality early-learning scheme—as strong evidence that families can become more stable and that disadvantaged chil- dren can be helped without having to move. The point is not to yearn for a return to “shotgun marriages”, he says, but to en- courage stable cohabiting relationships. This debate matters not just because two prominent economists disagree, but because they suggest different methods for tackling the urgent problem of intergener- ational immobility. Mr Chetty’s experi- mental work on the primacy of place will be an important test of his theories, yet it also has a limit on its scale: every disadvantaged American plainly cannot be moved to op- portunity. Mr Heckman’s project of en- couraging early-childhood education has some scaling questions, too: could every child in America receive a programme as intensive as the ones he studies? For now, the answer, as with all messy scientific de- bates, is to let the experiments proceed. 7

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws 22 United States The Economist May 16th 2020 2 dent”, because subpoenas require only a be privy to Mr Trump’s records while he re- more,” says Sean Hayden, co-owner of four “conceivable legislative purpose, and you mains in office). In Vance, Jay Sekulow, Mr establishments in midtown Manhattan. can’t think of a single example of a sub- Trump’s lawyer, offered a royalist vision of poena that wouldn’t meet that test?” the presidency shielded by “absolute im- Doyle’s Cafe in Boston pulled its last Justice Elena Kagan sought to elicit munity” from criminal investigation. But pint last year, ending 137 years in business; more persuasive responses from Mr Letter he struggled to explain how, in 1997, the its owners sold its coveted liquor licence and vividly depicted Mr Trump’s request as court could unanimously order Bill Clin- for a reported $450,000. Coogan’s, after placing a “ten-ton weight on the scales be- ton to appear for depositions in a sexual- nearly four decades in Manhattan’s Wash- tween the president and Congress”. Yet harassment suit, whereas a grand jury ington Heights, said it would close when it even Justice Stephen Breyer, a member of probing Mr Trump’s alleged payoffs to par- faced a steep rent rise in 2018. That the liberal wing, worried that the House amours was constitutionally barred from prompted a public protest, and the owners subpoenas might be unduly burdensome. peeking at the president’s papers. managed to renegotiate the contract. Now He was bothered, he said, by the prospect of the lockdown has done for it. It announced a red-baiting “future Senator McCarthy” Noel Francisco, the solicitor-general, last month that it would not reopen. haranguing “a future Franklin Roosevelt”. defended Mr Trump on somewhat less out- When rulings arrive this summer, Mr landish grounds. Carey Dunne, ably repre- Some neighbourhood bars have a Trump may win a majority in Trump v Ma- senting Mr Vance, argued that the investi- chance of surviving the lockdown. It helps zars—keeping his finances out of the news- gation was “well within the scope of legal that they often own the building (rents in papers, for now. But he seems likely to lose process permitted by this court” since 1807. midtown Manhattan can be as high as Trump v Vance, the clash over the New York If the justices side with Mr Trump, Mr $60,000 a month). They have lower over- subpoena (if so, only the grand jury would Dunne warned, presidents may wind up heads than those catering to tourists and unchecked and “above the law”. 7 the corporate-worker crowd. Their cus- tomers tend to be regulars. But it won’t be Irish pubs easy. Niall Henry, who owns three pubs in Upper Manhattan, including Tryon Public Craics in the business model House, is open for food pick-up and deliv- eries for first-responders, but has seen an NEW YORK 85-90% drop in revenue. Seamus Clarke, who owns J.P. Clarke’s Saloon on McLean Surviving covid could be harder than surviving Prohibition Avenue, just north of New York City, would be happy just to break even for the next few St patrick’s day was nearly two months Irish pub were already in place,” says Kevin years. Rory Dolan, who owns a normally ago, but shamrocks and leprechauns Kenny, a historian at New York University. bustling pub on the same street, expects it still decorate the windows of shuttered Many pubs in New York and Boston were will be at least two years before there is a re- New York City Irish pubs. On the eve of one struggling. Increases in rents and the mini- turn to normal. of the most profitable weeks of the pub mum wage were eating into profits. And year, in an attempt to stop covid-19 from drinking habits have changed. Boozy Mike Carty, owner of Rosie O’Grady’s in spreading, City Hall closed down Irish lunches are frowned upon. People want midtown Manhattan, says he cannot see pubs, along with other bars and restau- healthier food than traditional pub fare. To reopening his usually busy pub until Octo- rants. Some will never reopen. survive, some pubs are becoming less ber at the earliest. He may rejig the layout. overtly Irish. “You can’t get away with Mr Clarke, meanwhile, will temporarily not “Even before the lockdown, the struc- shepherd’s pie and chicken potpie any- allow people to sit at the bar. An Irish pub tural problems causing the decline of the without bar service, he admits, is almost a contradiction in terms. Last call Still, many owners are confident that customers will be back. Mr Dolan thinks it will be impossible to stop young people so- cialising. Irish pubs such as McSorley’s sur- vived Prohibition, when selling alcohol was banned for more than a decade. Molly’s Shebeen, operating since the 19th century, spent Prohibition selling groceries. Historically, “the Irish pub was the place where business was done, jobs were found and favours were traded, a very im- portant social function,” says Mr Kenny. Danny Price, an immigrant, says he got his first job in America and his first apartment through contacts made at J.P. Clarke’s. But although politicians still hold functions at pubs, they are no longer the hub for neigh- bourhood political-party machines. People will keep going for the craic (Irish for fun). Not all pubs need to reinvent themselves, says Andrew Rigie, head of the New York Hospitality Alliance, an industry group. “Sometimes just being traditional and keeping to your roots is the best busi- ness plan possible.” But the days when you could slap an “O’Reilly’s” sign over the front door and get crowds are long gone. 7

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Economist May 16th 2020 United States 23 The rule of law “I have an Article 2,” he has said, referring to the constitution’s article which vests ex- Friends with benefits ecutive power in the president, “where I have the right to do whatever I want as WASHINGTON, DC president.” Norms and judicial precedent disagree. But Mr Barr has long held a simi- In William Barr, Donald Trump has found his Roy Cohn, alas larly maximalist view of executive power. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” President pand voting rights and civil-rights protec- Months before his appointment he Donald Trump asked in early 2017, tions, for instance, and George W. Bush’s wrote a memo to Rod Rosenstein, then the after Jeff Sessions, his first attorney-gen- filed more briefs favouring religious liber- deputy attorney-general, explaining that eral, recused himself from the probe into ty than Mr Obama’s. the probe into Russian meddling “cannot Russian election-meddling. Mr Sessions provide a legitimate basis for interrogating explained that, since he was involved with But the department also defends settled the president,” because, in Mr Barr’s view, the campaign, he should not be involved in federal law, and its career lawyers pride “the President alone constitutes the Execu- any campaign investigation. themselves on defending statutes they tive branch,” has “all-encompassing” au- may disagree with politically. Mr Obama’s thority over federal law enforcement and Mr Trump had no patience for such doj, for instance, backed the Defence of cannot commit obstruction of justice qualms. He wanted a man who would serve Marriage Act, which defined marriage as a through the lawful exercise of his power— his interests as the legendarily fierce Cohn, union between a man and a woman, even such as firing an official involved in an in- a private lawyer in New York, had done— though Mr Obama had called for its repeal. vestigation into presidential misconduct. and as he believed Robert Kennedy had Mr Sessions upended this norm: his doj re- done for his brother John, and Eric Holder fused to back the Affordable Care Act’s con- Since taking over, Mr Barr has stated had done for Barack Obama. In William stitutionality. A former department lawyer that the Russia probe was “one of the great- Barr (pictured behind the president), Mr says this reversal was “unheard of”. est travesties in American history,” Sessions’s replacement, Mr Trump seems launched “without any basis…to sabotage to have found what he sought. Since Watergate, most attorneys-gen- the presidency.” The doj’s independent in- eral and the department’s civil servants spector-general found the investigation The attorney-general is America’s top have jealously guarded their remove from justified, and executed without bias. That law-enforcement officer, presiding over politics. As a veteran of its civil-rights divi- did not mollify Mr Barr, who has assigned the Department of Justice (doj). Partly by sion explains, “Most of the people who John Durham, a federal prosecutor, to look statute, but mostly by norm and practice, work there, and it’s true of me too, believe into its (well-established) origins. both the doj and its boss, particularly since in the mission of representing the United Watergate, maintain a degree of indepen- States. We believe that justice should be He has intervened to press for a lighter dence from the president, unlike other cab- carried out even-handedly. That’s what it sentence for Roger Stone, a Trump cam- inet departments. This independence is means to have a democracy.” During her paign adviser convicted of witness-tam- not absolute, nor could it be when the pres- confirmation hearings Loretta Lynch, Mr pering and lying to Congress. On May 7th ident appoints, and can fire, the attorney- Obama’s second attorney-general, repeat- he dropped a case against Michael Flynn, general, his two top deputies, those leading edly promised independence. Griffin Bell, Mr Trump’s former national security advis- the department’s divisions and the prose- Jimmy Carter’s first—and the first truly er. The doj argued that it could not “prove cutors heading each of the 93 us attorneys’ post-Watergate one—screened all commu- its case beyond a reasonable doubt”—de- offices around America and its territories. nication from the White House “to insure spite the fact that Mr Flynn had pleaded that any improper attempts to influence a guilty and accepted responsibility in open To some extent, every president’s doj decision” did not reach senior officials. court for lying to federal investigators. But reflects his policy preferences and priori- his unusual move has encountered unusu- ties. Mr Obama’s vigorously pushed to ex- Mr Trump brushes aside such niceties. al resistance: the sentencing judge has ap- pointed a former prosecutor to oppose the doj’s motion, and may even be mulling a perjury charge against Mr Flynn. Enemies, beware Both of those decisions by Mr Barr prompted doj lawyers to withdraw from the cases they helped prosecute. Mr Trump is now pushing an “Obamagate” theory that Mr Obama and his vice-president, Joe Bi- den, orchestrated the Russia investigation to hobble him. Many worry that the next step will be using the doj to pursue Mr Trump’s ene- mies. More than 2,000 former employees have signed a letter calling on Mr Barr to re- sign, and for Congress to censure him for his “repeated assaults on the rule of law”. The civil-rights-department veteran says that morale has plummeted. “People I talk to [at the doj] feel like the institution is be- ing damaged…The notion that government lawyers act in a non-partisan way to en- force the law is being assaulted.” Such dam- age is much easier done than undone. 7

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws 24 United States The Economist May 16th 2020 Lexington Mike Pompeo’s followership The secretary of state is confusing global leadership with barking for his master For a man acknowledged to be highly intelligent, Mike Pompeo Hence his recent prominence, haranguing China and Afghani- has a long history of talking nonsense. As a greenhorn House stan’s feuding leaders and this week flying to Israel to discuss an- member, brought to Congress by the Tea Party wave of 2010, he nexation and Iran. Along the way he has secured a few small but made his name by pushing conspiracy theories about Hillary Clin- worthwhile successes. America’s capitulation to the Taliban ton. He claimed, without evidence, that she was complicit in the would have been even more hasty had Mr Pompeo not opened a murder of four Americans at an outpost in Benghazi, Libya, to a de- diplomatic effort with Pakistan to slow it. This is a more nuanced gree that was “worse, in some ways, than Watergate”. As Donald record than Mr Pompeo’s conspiracy-theorising might suggest. Trump’s secretary of state, he has encouraged a comparison, pop- ular with Trump-loving evangelicals, between the irreligious pres- At the root of this is that he holds, and on occasion pushes, fair- ident and the Jewish heroine Esther. His recent insistence that co- ly conventional conservative views, yet is more willing to defer to vid-19 probably emerged from a Chinese laboratory—a conclusion Mr Trump than were Mr Bolton or any of the president’s other dis- American spies appear not to share—was of this pattern. carded advisers. Like Jim Mattis and John Kelly, the secretary of state has a bullish military manner that the president loves. But The world has taken that into account. While Mr Pompeo has unlike the generals, Mr Pompeo, who served in the army for only a enraged the Chinese, hardly anyone else outside the Republican few years, is always ready to take orders. His China-baiting, an ob- base seems to have taken his allegation all that seriously. The other vious effort to distract from Mr Trump’s struggles with the pan- half of America discounted it on the basis that Mr Pompeo said it. demic, was a case in point. So, too, the many times he has found Officials in Australia, Germany and elsewhere similarly cast doubt the words to defend presidential impulses he clearly abhorred: on it. It is hard to think the words of any previous American chief such as Mr Trump’s threatened troop withdrawal from Syria. diplomat, a role traditionally considered supra-partisan to a de- gree, have carried less weight. Two particular reasons seem to explain Mr Pompeo’s flexibility. One is personal. After a promising early career, he spent 12 years in Yet, in an administration of mediocrities, Mr Pompeo remains Kansas on a series of undistinguished business ventures. He then a substantial figure. He is one of its last significant talents. Even came to Washington, dc, hungry to make up for lost time. His at- his critics note his smarts—famously displayed in a stellar record tacks on Mrs Clinton were a statement of intent. Yet his subse- at West Point and Harvard Law School—and policy seriousness. quent climb is mainly due to Mr Trump’s need for fresh faces for an His articulation of an America First foreign policy that engages administration that many Republicans were unwilling to join or, with the world consistently but sceptically is a fair stab at making because of past criticism of the president, unwelcome in. Mr Pom- Trumpism coherent. Mr Pompeo, contrary to the impression he peo could not otherwise have soared from a little-known con- sometimes gives, is a serious grown-up, who has at least grudging gressman to a front-ranker with realistic presidential ambitions. respect from many in the foreign-policy establishment. His basic No one in the administration owes Mr Trump more than he does. vision, of a confident America working with allies, is pretty stan- dard foreign policy, suggests Leon Panetta, a former Democratic The other explanation is that Mr Pompeo represents a broader cia director and defence secretary. politicisation of foreign policy, which predates Mr Trump. In 2013 he and Tom Cotton, then a fellow House member but since elected At the same time, almost uniquely among those who are nei- to the Senate, wrote a column urging Republicans to grant Barack ther related to the president nor rich, he has managed to retain Mr Obama’s request for congressional support for an attack on Syria. Trump’s confidence. Since the sacking of John Bolton eight It is hard to imagine them—two ultra-partisan Republicans—sup- months ago, he has been the administration’s foreign-policy tsar. porting any Democratic initiative now. This seepage of partisan- Mark Esper and Robert O’Brien, the defence secretary and national ship into one of the few remaining holdouts was perhaps inevita- security adviser, are nonentities by comparison. ble. Yet it has accelerated under Mr Trump, in part because blaming the other side is the easiest way for establishment Republicans to justify his protectionism and other offences against conservative orthodoxy. It is no coincidence that Mr Pompeo’s signature con- cern, his extreme hostility to the Iranian regime and the nuclear deal Mr Obama made with it, is one of the most polarising there is. This makes it an issue the secretary of state might privately cite, if he ever felt the need back in Kansas one day, to justify any number of compromises for Mr Trump. Back to Kansas The hyper-partisanship of foreign policy Mr Pompeo has come to represent is a dreadful lookout, unworthy of his talents. It carries a risk of endless instability, with successive administrations seek- ing to undo their predecessors’ legacy, just as Mr Trump has sought to dismantle Mr Obama’s. It also introduces a new rationale for American diplomacy as far removed from its expansive, globally minded strengths as it is possible to imagine. This wretched mo- ment exemplifies that. On current form, Mr Pompeo will not be re- membered for squeezing Iran. He will be remembered for under- cutting the world’s reasonable case against China’s handling of the virus by throwing mud for his boss in the midst of a pandemic. That is not American leadership. 7

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Americas The Economist May 16th 2020 25 Bolivia ly elected president took over. But in Janu- ary she said that she would be among the In limbo candidates. Foes accuse her of misusing the pandemic to secure her hold on power.   The country needs an election, but will find it difficult to hold one A fair election would either wrest from On april 21st, a month into Bolivia’s those protests. On November 6th, a mob of Ms Áñez the power she has amassed or leg- lockdown, police in riot gear swarmed Mr Morales’s opponents dragged her from itimise her hold on it. The country needs the home of Patricia Arce, the mayor of the town hall, cut her hair, doused her in such a vote to avoid a return of violence. Vinto, a city in the department of Cocha- red paint and paraded her through town. But most people support her handling of bamba, and a senate candidate for the left- Ms Áñez’s rule-breaking birthday bash the pandemic and are in no rush to vote. No wing Movement to Socialism (mas). Her shows that, now that she is in power, the one knows when the lockdown limbo will family, their driver and a friend were cele- former opposition is “doing exactly what end. While it lasts, Bolivians will have to be brating her son’s 27th birthday with cake they criticised”, says Ms Arce.  on guard to ensure that Ms Áñez does not and chicha, a fermented-corn drink. All abuse the trust they have placed in her. nine were jailed for two nights and charged This tale of two festivities is a sign that with violating quarantine orders.  last year’s wounds are still raw. To heal In Bolivia, a strict lockdown is the gov- them, Bolivia was supposed to hold a re- ernment’s “only weapon” against covid-19, Two weeks later, photos surfaced on run of presidential and congressional elec- says a diplomat. With a population of 11m, Facebook of a birthday party in La Paz, Bo- tions on May 3rd, free from the fraud that the country has only 430 intensive-care livia’s administrative capital, for the marred last October’s vote. The pandemic beds and 190 doctors qualified to treat pa- daughter of the country’s interim presi- has postponed them. Ms Áñez has imposed tients who occupy them. Mr Morales, who dent, Jeanine Áñez, a conservative Catho- one of Latin America’s strictest lockdowns, benefited from a boom in natural-gas rev- lic. Two guests had hitched a ride from Ta- with harsh punishments for violators, and enues during his 14-year presidency, spent rija, a department in the south, on an resisted setting a date for elections. She ini- money to reduce maternal and infant mor- air-force jet. Ms Áñez’s critics accused her tially promised to leave office when a new- tality. But he did little to strengthen the of hypocrisy. She had denounced such health system. Last year, as a pre-election abuses of power by Evo Morales, her mas Also in this section ploy, he launched free universal health predecessor, who resigned late last year care. But he failed to budget for clinics, after an attempt to rig his re-election led to 26 Venezuela’s farcical plot supplies and the 20,000 professionals protests in which at least 36 people died. needed to provide it, says Fernando Rome- 27 Bello: Recalling the Shining Path ro of Sirmes, the public-health workers’ Ms Arce, as it happens, was a casualty of union in La Paz. Doctors reacted by staging months of strikes. By May13th this year, Bo- livia had conducted just 13,605 tests for the virus, among the lowest rates in the region. Under Ms Áñez’s lockdown rules just1

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws 26 The Americas The Economist May 16th 2020 2 one person from each household is al- suggested that the pandemic is an inven- A propaganda coup lowed out once a week, between 7am and tion of the right. Mr Doria Medina accuses noon. Some measures seem more political the party of exploiting privation. the story. “It cannot possibly be real,” said than protective. The decree establishing Edgar, a van driver in Caracas. But it seems the lockdown, published on March 25th, Still, the malcontents are a minority. In the plot was real, and that the plotters at criminalises “individuals who incite non- a poll by Ipsos conducted on May 2nd-7th, least initially had the backing of the leaders compliance” and “misinform or cause un- 69% of respondents approved of Ms Áñez’s of the opposition. certainty to the population”. This has been handling of the pandemic. The govern- used to prosecute dozens of “digital war- ment has given grants to families and in- In September 2019 a team representing riors”. Mauricio Jara, for example, down- formal workers worth up to 500 bolivianos Juan Guaidó, the head of the National As- played the threat of the virus and called the ($73) per person, which may help explain sembly, who is recognised by most West- government “dictatorial” on WhatsApp that support. Bolivians adhere to the lock- ern democracies as Venezuela’s interim groups such as “Evo the Best”. He was down more rigorously than citizens of any president, met in Miami to consider plans charged with sedition and endangering other Latin American country, according to to remove Mr Maduro by force. Juan Ren- public health, and jailed. On May 10th the data from Google Analytics. Two-thirds do dón, a political consultant who led the government toughened the decree. Now not want elections to take place within the delegation, later said that Mr Guaidó had information of “any form, whether writ- next 90 days. A survey by Ciesmori in April made it clear that he should explore “all op- ten, printed or artistic”, that undermines found that Ms Áñez led the eight presiden- tions”. The team heard a pitch from Jordan the quarantine can lead to charges. tial candidates, with 26% of voters plan- Goudreau, an American special-forces vet- Such behaviour raises fears that Ms ning to back her. Mr Arce was just behind at eran who is boss of Silvercorp, a previously Áñez is replacing Mr Morales’s authoritar- 24%. They may face each other in a run-off. obscure Florida-based security outfit. Its ian rule with her own conservative version. website portrays him boxing bare-chested. “We need evidence that once the most criti- Salvador Romero, the respected presi- His private email address, now disabled, cal stage of the pandemic is over, the gov- dent of the electoral tribunal, plans to hold included the number 007. He proposed as- ernment’s intention is to finish its man- the election by the legislature’s August 2nd sembling several hundred fighters, mostly date as soon as possible,” says Carlos Mesa, deadline, assuming the constitutional deserters from the Venezuelan army, to nab a centrist candidate for president. On April court does not overturn it. Bolivia cannot Mr Maduro and Diosdado Cabello, his 30th the legislature, which is controlled by follow the example of richer countries that number two. His price: $212,900,000. mas, passed a law setting a deadline of Au- have spread out voting over several days or gust 2nd for elections. (The electoral tribu- shifted to mail-in ballots, says Mr Romero. Apparently impressed, the delegation nal had proposed a date between June 7th That would be a logistical nightmare. The signed a contract in October. The docu- and September 6th.) Lawmakers from Ms commission plans to train poll workers in ment, which Mr Rendón later described as Áñez’s party challenged the law in the con- small groups. The vote itself will take place “exploratory”, is detailed and delusional. stitutional court when the legislature over- as usual, probably with hand sanitisers and The “service provider” would receive turned her veto.  face masks. Voting is mandatory, but many monthly instalments averaging $14.8m for This, plus allegations of corruption in Bolivians may stay home unless they think a 495-day mission. After “project comple- the defence ministry and the state oil and the pandemic is under control. That may tion” its (undisclosed) financial backers gas firm, has alienated critics of Mr Mo- prompt the losers to challenge the legiti- would have “preferred-vendor” status with rales who had initially supported her. “Dur- macy of the results. Bolivia is still a long the government of a liberated Venezuela. ing the honeymoon, we all looked the other way from a political cure. 7 Silvercorp would take 14% of the value of way,” admits Raúl Peñaranda, a journalist. any art, cash and gold it seized. Forty-eight journalists issued a statement Venezuela calling Mr Jara’s arrest illegal. Even Ms Mr Goudreau says Mr Guaidó approved Áñez’s running-mate, Samuel Doria Medi- Bay of piglets the plan, dubbed Operation Gideon. He has na, does not defend the part of the decree given the media a copy of a contract with on which it was based. “Frankly, it was a A farcical attempt to remove Nicolás Mr Guaidó’s signature. Mr Guaidó has de- mistake, absurd,” he says. “In a democracy Maduro has strengthened him nied signing it. The opposition says it end- you don’t do that kind of thing.” He blames ed the contract in November, when Mr1 the justice ministry, not Ms Áñez. Nicolás maduro, Venezuela’s dictator, In parts of Bolivia, suspicion of her always welcomes a distraction from along with the deprivation caused by the the calamity of his rule. Early this month lockdown are causing new outbreaks of vi- his enemies provided a good one. Two olence. On April 30th protesters in El Alto, a boats carrying a score of mercenaries at- poor neighbour of La Paz, threw stones at tempted to land near Caracas, the capital. buses carrying medical workers. They were In a skirmish on May 3rd, Venezuelan demanding new elections and an end to forces killed eight raiders. The next day, the lockdown. On May 11th security forces two American former soldiers, apparently tear-gassed protesters in Cochabamba who suffering from seasickness, were among were blocking roads and burning tyres. “If the invaders captured from a skiff as it there’s no bread for the poor, there’s no drifted 20km (12 miles) west of the earlier peace for the rich,” one sign read. incursion. During their interrogations, lat- mas hopes to profit from such senti- er broadcast on state television, they con- ments. It splintered after Mr Morales fled fessed to taking part in a plot to kidnap Mr the country. Under his leadership from ex- Maduro and fly him to the United States. ile in Argentina it has lately become more united and strident. Luis Arce (no relation Some Venezuelans, used to Mr Madu- to Patricia), the party’s presidential candi- ro’s diversionary tactics, refused to believe date, is his pick. Some mas politicians have

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Economist May 16th 2020 The Americas 27 2 Goudreau started behaving erratically and tion from Colombia, General Alcalá public- ican sanctions, have led to fuel shortages. demanding huge payments. He accuses the ly revealed details of the plot, thus ensur- The pandemic has cut remittances from opposition of reneging. ing its failure. A rump of the invasion force Venezuelans abroad. (It has also eased fuel Despite that, Mr Goudreau set up camps went ahead anyway, perhaps enticed by shortages by reducing traffic.) in Colombia and began securing weapons bounties offered in March by the United with help from Clíver Alcalá, a former Ven- States ($15m for Mr Maduro, $10m for Mr Thanks to Operation Gideon, the oppo- ezuelan general. Waiting for guns, recruits Cabello). Venezuelan troops awaited them. sition, fractured at the best of times, is in trained with broomsticks. According to Mr Goudreau stayed at home. no shape to take advantage of Mr Maduro’s some reports, the American cia urged Mr weakness. Moderates may distance them- Goudreau to abandon the plan. In March The farce is such a godsend to Mr Madu- selves from Mr Guaidó. International sup- the United States indicted General Alcalá ro that many Venezuelans no doubt sus- port may flag. The raid provoked much (along with Mr Maduro and other regime pect him of having somehow connived in mockery, but Carmen, a shopkeeper in Ca- members) for drug-trafficking. it. In other areas, his regime is in trouble. racas whose three children emigrated last The day before his voluntary extradi- The price of oil, Venezuela’s main export, year, has a wiser response: “This is a trage- has plunged. Mismanagement, plus Amer- dy without end.” 7 Bello Looking back on the Shining Path The battle against murderous Maoist guerrillas changed Peru, for better and worse Forty years ago this week, on the eve night. Villagers soon tired of Sendero. Both ways, both he and Sendero weakened of a presidential election that ended a it and the army committed massacres. institutions. military dictatorship, five masked in- Only when the army recognised villagers truders set fire to the ballot box in Chus- as allies, organising them in militias, was Max Hernández, a psychoanalyst, chi, a village in the Ayacucho region of Sendero defeated in its heartland. By then argues that despite the Truth Commis- the Peruvian Andes. Their action kicked it had taken its terror and bombings to sion, the country “never carried out the off modern Latin America’s strangest and Lima. It contributed to and fed on an eco- job of grieving, of trauma relief”. He says most brutal guerrilla insurgency, the nomic collapse. that the war revealed that, after five 12-year terrorist war of Sendero Lumi- centuries of racial mixing, Peru had yet noso (Shining Path), a fundamentalist Mr Guzmán created a bombastic perso- to bridge the divide between its indige- Maoist outfit akin to Pol Pot’s Khmer nality cult, calling himself “President nous population and the rest. Three- Rouge in Cambodia. Gonzalo” and bracketing himself with quarters of the victims of the war were Marx, Lenin and Mao as the “fourth sword Quechua-speaking rural people, treated Today, although unexpected death of Marxism-Leninism”. He acted with with contempt by Mr Guzmán and with has returned in the form of covid-19, Peru absolute moral dissonance. He directed indifference by the state. is a vastly better place. But the terror the slaughter from the comfort of rented unleashed by Sendero (as Peruvians houses in posh districts of Lima. When In this century a flood of books about called the group), often matched by the old-fashioned detective work tracked him the Sendero years has appeared. In 2015 a state’s response, exposed social fractures down in 1992, he meekly surrendered. Now museum of memory opened in Lima. and left scars. A Truth and Reconciliation aged 85, he has spent decades in jail. A few Based on the work of the Truth Commis- Commission later reckoned that 69,000 thousand of his supporters lurk in Lima’s sion, it is moving and even-handed, people were killed or “disappeared”, and shantytowns. telling the stories of victims on all sides. around 500,000 were driven from their It has few visitors. Many Peruvians who homes. It blamed Sendero for nearly half Alberto Fujimori, who presided over lived through their country’s darkest of the dead, government forces for Sendero’s defeat and the economy’s reviv- recent chapter want to forget. around a third and village militias for al, used its threat to erect a dictatorship. most of the rest. Hailed by many as a saviour, and hated by As for Ayacucho, “terrorism destroyed many others as a corrupt authoritarian, Mr everything,” says Carlos Añanyos, whose Sendero was the creation of Abimael Fujimori continues to divide. In different family set up a soft-drinks business in Guzmán, a philosophy professor who Huamanga in 1988 that is now a multi- gained control of the university in the national headquartered in Madrid. The colonial city of Huamanga, Ayacucho’s region’s income per person is still only capital, in the 1970s, recruiting students two-thirds of the national average. Mr and teachers, especially women. His Añanyos has set up a foundation that, insurgency’s centre was Ayacucho’s rural pre-pandemic, was promoting tourism hinterland of rutted dirt roads, bleak in Ayacucho, as well as the region’s pro- mountains and lonely villages of Que- ducts, such as speciality potatoes, natu- chua-speaking subsistence farmers. ral colourings and handicrafts. Sendero would come to be abhorred by most Peruvians. But its lynchings of There are other grounds for hope. Out abusive officials and traders in a neglect- of the wreckage of the 1980s Peru created ed region of an unjust country initially a successful market economy that garnered it some popular support. slashed poverty. The racial divide has blurred, especially among the young. Bello made half-a-dozen reporting Economic growth has reached people in trips to Ayacucho in those years and the Andes, thanks to better communica- recalls the atmosphere of menace and tions. Ayacucho means “corner of the grief in a faceless war, often conducted at dead” in Quechua. Covid-19 aside, at least that is no longer true.

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UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws Asia The Economist May 16th 2020 29 The Mekong spurred saltwater intrusion in the delta, leaving many people with no fresh water to Torrent to trickle drink. “All the environmental indicators are in the red,” says Marc Goichot of the SINGAPORE wwf, a global conservation group. South-East Asia’s biggest river is drying up, in part because of Chinese dams A drought in the lower basin played a big part in the atrophying of the river. But Fish writhe frantically in the shallow Yet the river is ailing. Last year the water disappointing rains may not have been the pool, as their schoolmates stranded on in the Mekong fell to its lowest level since whole story. A new study claims that the 11 the exposed sandbar breathe their last. It is records began more than 60 years ago. dams built on the Chinese portion of the November, the end of the monsoon season, Cambodia endured months of debilitating Mekong (see map on next page) exacerbat- yet the water in the Mekong river is peril- electricity blackouts because there was too ed the water shortage. Alan Basist and ously low. On this stretch, in north-eastern little water to run a big hydropower plant. Claude Williams, of Eyes on Earth Inc, an Thailand, the bank is so parched the earth Fish catches declined by as much as environmental consultancy, used records has cracked, and once-leafy bushes are 80-90% in parts of the country, whose citi- of precipitation, snowmelt and water lev- bone dry. Visitors have flocked to the desic- zens obtain almost two-thirds of their pro- els before most of the dams were built to cated river bed to catch the trapped carp tein from their nets. The parched condi- develop a model of how much water would with their bare hands, but their delight tions are thought to have lopped $1.5bn off normally flow into Thailand under differ- does not diminish the disquiet of locals. Thailand’s gdp, according to Krungsri, a lo- ent weather conditions. They then com- “These fish were parent fish,” says Ormbun cal bank. In Vietnam the measly flow pared this “natural” water level to the actu- Thipsuna, a local fish farmer, recalling the al flow after the dams had been built. scene. “No life any more,” she sighs. Also in this section During the monsoon season, the lower Me- kong normally floods; during the dry sea- The Mekong animates a vast swathe of 30 Sino-Indian border disputes son the waters recede. Since the first big Asia, from the snow-packed mountains of dams began operating in 2012, this annual south-western China from which it 31 Adultery in Taiwan pulse has been tamed: more water is now springs, to Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and sent downstream than is typical during the Vietnam in the lower portion of the basin. 31 A new covid cluster in South Korea dry season and less is dispatched during As it meanders along its 4,500km route, it the wet season.  feeds and waters some 66m people. 32 Banyan: Militarising Sri Lanka The study also found that in 2019 Chi- na’s part of the basin received more rain and snow than normal, despite the govern-1

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws 30 Asia The Economist May 16th 2020 2 ment’s claims that China, too, was suffer- Tibet Mekong dams Sino-Indian border disputes ing from drought. Had all that water flowed INDIA Capacity >100MW downstream, the river would have been be- MYANMAR High dudgeon tween seven and eight metres deep as it en- Operational tered Thailand—higher than usual for that Planned Two vast armies settle their differences time of year. In fact, it was less than three Postponed by pushing, shoving and punching metres. Just two of China’s dams can store almost as much water as the Chesapeake Source: Stimson Centre The last Indian soldiers to die on the Bay, an estuary of more than 11,000 square country’s frontier with China, the lon- kilometres in America. During the dry sea- Sichuan gest disputed border in the world, were son the upper reaches of the basin should shot in 1975, when patrols from the two contribute about 40% of the water flowing CHINA countries stumbled across one another in through the lower Mekong. “The Chinese dense fog. The nuclear-armed neighbours basically shut off the tap,” Mr Basist says. Yunnan have beefed up their border forces consid- Turning it on, he argues, “would have cer- erably since then, but have also worked to tainly helped alleviate the drought”. Chiang LAOS VIETNAM ensure that their disputes do not lead to The study, which was funded by Ameri- Saen bloodshed. That is why two clashes be- ca’s government, has its critics. China’s for- Hanoi tween Indian and Chinese soldiers in re- eign ministry rubbished it, and even the cent days have been limited to a relatively Mekong River Commission (mrc), which Vientiane Gulf of genteel form of combat: fisticuffs. works with the governments of Cambodia, Tonkin Laos, Thailand and Vietnam to manage the THAILAND The most recent Sino-Indian confronta- river, has reservations. Anoulak Kitti- tion occurred three years ago. In June 2017 khoun of the mrc says drought was the CAMBODIA China began building a road in a spot main reason for the Mekong’s meagre flow. known as Doklam, where India, China and He does agree, however, that it would be Phnom South the tiny mountainous kingdom of Bhutan helpful to have a better sense of the part Penh China meet. That led to a tense 73-day standoff be- China’s dams played. tween Indian and Chinese forces before “The point still remains”, says Maureen Gulf of Sea both sides agreed to fall back. An informal Harris of International Rivers, a pressure Thailand summit the following April between Na- group, “that China could have done and can rendra Modi, India’s prime minister, and Xi do more to alleviate the conditions being 250 km Jinping, China’s president (in, of all places, felt downstream.” Indeed, it has done so the Chinese city of Wuhan, soon to become before. In 2016, when the lower Mekong ther. Again, there are encouraging signs. the birthplace of covid-19), seemed to was afflicted by another severe drought, Last November the Lancang Mekong Coop- soothe relations between the rivals. But the China released water from its dams at the eration, an organisation founded by China “Wuhan spirit”, as boosters termed it, has mrc’s request. “It goes without saying that in 2016 to promote trade among the Me- clearly faded. friends should help each other when help kong countries, agreed to team up with the is needed,” said China’s foreign ministry. mrc to investigate what caused last year’s During April tensions appeared to build In January, China boosted the flow again, drought. But as promising as that is, greater between Indian and Chinese troops in La- this time at Thailand’s behest. transparency will not create more water. dakh, a high plateau at the western edge of The extra water is coming at the wrong Tibet. On May 5th these erupted into vio- time, unfortunately. A damp dry season The Mekong is “at breaking point”, says lence when Chinese troops reportedly took prevents birds from laying eggs on exposed Ms Harris. To save it, the countries that issue with an Indian patrol on the north riverbanks, and farmers from planting share it need to bin plans for additional bank of Pangong lake, where the two coun- crops in the rich sediment deposited dur- dams: China intends to build eight more tries have overlapping claims. The result- ing the monsoon. In Thailand sudden tor- and Laos seven. Cambodia is moving in the ing fist-fight and stone-pelting resulted in rents of water have washed away boats and right direction. In March the government injuries on both sides, including to senior entire river banks, reports Pianporn Deetes declared a moratorium on all hydropower officers. Indian officials remain concerned of International Rivers. Ms Ormbun can no projects on the Mekong for the next decade. about Chinese construction activity in La- longer sell the fish she raises at the markets Unless other countries follow suit, Ms Har- dakh near Daulat Beg Oldi, a vital airfield, that normally spring up on beaches ex- ris frets that “the Mekong river basin as it’s and Demchok, a strategically located vil- posed during the dry season. “The river is at been known for thousands of years…will lage. Then on May 9th another skirmish its best when it can run its natural course,” not be the same in the future.” 7 broke out 1,000km to the east at Naku La, a says Brian Eyler, author of “The Last Days of mountain pass near Doklam. Shortly after- the Mighty Mekong”. wards Nepal, another small kingdom China has not signed any agreements wedged between the two giants, which Mr about managing the Mekong with the other Xi visited in October, complained about In- countries it flows through, so is not obliged dia’s own road-building in yet another dis- to share a particular amount of water with puted border area. them, nor even provide data on the flow or any warning about the operations of its Small dust-ups are common. Thanks in dams. It does provide the mrc with a trickle part to slapdash colonial cartography, the of information about water levels and boundary between India and China is un- planned releases from dams, which helps defined. Whereas India and Pakistan agree with flood-control lower down the river. where the “line of control” separating their Mr Eyler hopes that studies like Mr Ba- forces runs in the disputed territory of sist’s will prompt China to go a bit fur- Kashmir, India and China have different1

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Economist May 16th 2020 Asia 31 2 views about the exact location of the “line been held by the courts to refer to vaginal Covid-19 in South Korea of actual control” they are patrolling. En- intercourse between a man and a woman. counters between units from the two sides It is not clear, therefore, whether the law A catchy beat are therefore inevitable. Agreements applies to gay couples, says Shawn Tsai signed in 1996 and 2003 established proto- Ching-hsiang, the minister of justice. SEOUL cols to deal with such incidents, including promises not to use weapons. The result- What is more, the narrow definition of A cluster of infections at nightclubs ing gunless confrontations range from the crime and the reluctance of courts to mars the relaxation of restrictions mere jostling to more serious melees, com- convict in the absence of clear proof have plete with rock-throwing and acrobatic fly- fostered a cottage industry: private investi- Apart from the temperature checks at ing kicks. gators attempt to demonstrate not just that the boarding gate and the face masks Such scuffles might become yet more a married person has been having surrepti- worn by passengers and crew, there was frequent. Negotiations to define the border tious trysts with someone of the opposite nothing unusual about the flight that left have made little progress, and troops are sex, but also that the pair have been having Seoul’s Gimpo airport for the southern is- bumping into each other more often. Tanvi intercourse. The snoops have been known land of Jeju on the morning of May 1st. Madan of the Brookings Institution, a to wait outside hotel rooms listening for There was not a single spare seat on the think-tank, points out that, after years in moans before bursting in, camera in hand. plane, nor on many of the 108 others that which China improved infrastructure and A couple caught together in bed once es- departed for the same destination that day. increased the military presence on its side caped conviction, notes Kuan Hsiao-wei of of the border, India has recently been doing National Taipei University, by claiming Buoyed by much-relaxed social-dis- the same. At the Wuhan summit Messrs they were just chatting, albeit naked. But it tancing recommendations following Modi and Xi both agreed to give “strategic is worth scorned spouses’ while to try to weeks of very few new cases of covid-19, guidance” to their respective armies to cool catch their partner in flagrante, since the Seoulites emerged from their cramped it. “The exact opposite is happening,” says threat of pressing charges can help secure a apartments to spend the long holiday Jabin Jacob of Shiv Nadar University. more favourable divorce settlement. weekend by the sea. Closer to home, thou- “Nationalist narratives in both countries sands of partygoers from both Seoul and are beginning to percolate down to the Despite all these flaws, Taiwanese seem the rest of the country flocked to the capi- militaries in difficult-to-control ways.” 7 to like the adultery law. A poll conducted in tal’s bars and clubs, which had reopened 2017 by the Taiwanese Public Opinion after a brief closure in April. Sexual mores in Taiwan Foundation found that 69% of adults want- ed to keep it on the books. An earlier gov- The return of domestic tourism and Philanderers hold ernment survey found even stronger sup- nightlife reflected public confidence in port for retaining the law. “In Taiwanese South Korea’s ability to keep the virus at their breath society, everyone thinks a stable marriage bay. But in at least one instance, that confi- and family is the foundation of social sta- dence was misplaced. The tourists who TA I P E I bility,” Mr Tsai says. frolicked by the sea suffered few adverse consequences beyond a spot of sunburn. The courts may decriminalise adultery Nonetheless, several lower courts have Revellers in Seoul’s clubs, however, were asked the constitutional court to review not so lucky. Shortly after the long week- It is an odd mix. Taiwan is the only coun- the law. It heard oral arguments on the sub- end, it emerged that customers had carried try in Asia to have legalised gay marriage ject on March 31st, and says it will an- the virus into several busy nightspots. (unless you count Australia and New Zea- nounce a ruling at the end of May. The court More than 100 new infections have been land). But it is also one of the few countries upheld the law as recently as 2002, but traced to clubs in Itaewon, a popular enter- in Asia, along with conservative Muslim since then has issued a series of more liber- tainment district. Since the affected areas places such as Afghanistan and Brunei, al rulings. It was the court, for example, saw thousands of visitors on the date in where adultery remains a crime. From 2016 which ordered parliament to legalise gay question, the number of infections is likely to 2019 the police investigated more than marriage in 2017. Mr Tsai says the govern- to continue to rise. 10,000 people they suspected of philander- ment is open-minded about the law’s fu- ing. More than 1,200 were convicted. The ture. The judges, however, are likely to be Tracking down potential patients, guilty all received fines, averaging 90,000 more categorical. 7 which has been South Korea’s main Taiwan dollars ($3,000). They could in the- strength in suppressing the virus, has ory have been jailed for up to a year. And Keep your vows—or else proved harder than during previous out- many straying spouses end up with a crim- breaks. Contact-tracing initially focused inal record. on a handful of gay bars visited by a man who later tested positive. Homosexuality is Worse, the weight of prosecutions falls often stigmatised in South Korea. Being largely on women. When husbands are outed as gay (the effective result of the caught cheating, some wives forgive them, man’s home town and workplace becom- but insist on pressing charges against the ing public knowledge in the process of con- other woman. Cuckolded men, by contrast, tact-tracing) can lead to people being fired tend to press charges against both their from their jobs and ostracised by friends, wives and their lovers. The result is that family and neighbours. Many of the names 54% of those convicted in recent years have and telephone numbers on the lists of cus- been women. For other crimes in Taiwan, tomers that clubs have been obliged to men earn roughly 80% of all convictions. keep since reopening turned out to be fake. The adultery law dates from 1935 and its In response, authorities are adjusting age leads to further peculiarities. The term their tracing methods. They are now offer- it uses for adultery—tongjian—has long ing free and anonymous testing for any- body who went near the affected areas in late April and early May. In a break with1

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws 32 Asia The Economist May 16th 2020 2 previous practice, they are seeking to reas- dents tested positive. During the May holiday weekend, Jeju sure people that they will publish minimal The outbreak has probably spread more felt little changed from before the pandem- information about their identity and ic, bar a dearth of Chinese tour groups. routes. But delays associated with worries widely than it might have given the recent Beaches, coffee shops and bike lanes were about privacy have probably already uptick in domestic travel, with cases relat- packed with visitors, many of whom ap- pushed up the number of infections asso- ed to the Itaewon clubs being discovered as peared to have left their face masks at the ciated with the incident. far afield as Busan and Jeju. The bounce- airport. A guesthouse-owner on the island, The new outbreak has slowed the re- back in domestic tourism has been swift, who caters mainly to tourists in their 20s, sumption of normal life. Clubs have been as people have grown keener to get away says that occupancy has reached around ordered to shut again until June 7th. The re- from it all but have little scope to travel 80% of the typical level: “Everything is opening of schools, originally planned for abroad. Flight capacity from Seoul to Jeju, starting to get back to normal.” Unfortu- this week, has been pushed back by a week. the world’s busiest air route, is back to 95% nately, periodic surges in infections and Thousands of cram schools have also been of its usual average after dropping by half consequent adjustments to the rules are told to close after a teacher and several stu- in March, when social-distancing recom- also likely to become normal. 7 mendations were at their most stringent. Banyan Soldiers everywhere Sri Lanka’s new president is putting men in uniform in charge of everything Before the presidential election he past or present, are in charge of customs, Lanka, over 500 are members of the won last November, Gotabaya Raja- the port authority, development, agricul- armed forces or their close contacts. paksa laid out for Banyan his vision for ture and poverty eradication. The army Sri Lanka. It was a sunlit upland of peace- commander, General Shavendra Silva, Nor is there much reason to believe ful, inclusive “knowledge-based” devel- runs the coronavirus task-force. Top brass that military men will do a better job of opment. All the political bickering of are also expected to be named to plum running ports, reducing poverty or in- recent years, “Gota” promised, would be ambassadorships. creasing crop yields. For now, the main swept aside by his programme of brisk, question is accountability. The positions technocratic proficiency. His years as an The president’s backers bridle at any filled by officers have little civilian over- army officer would ensure that. suggestion that this is an unhealthy trend. sight. It does not help that Mr Rajapaksa They point out that the top customs job is has dissolved the old parliament, while A military timbre to the former lieu- an irresistible temptation to civilian in- elections for a new one have been thwart- tenant-colonel’s rule was always on the cumbents. Yet they do not explain how it ed by the epidemic. The president and cards. Mr Rajapaksa’s campaign dwelt on would be any more resistible to military his aides govern by decree. the need for a “disciplined society”. men. As for handling the coronavirus, Viyathmaga, a social movement with given that the bureaucracy is hidebound It reinforces what Kanishka Jayasu- political ambitions that backed him, and civilian capacities are weak, deploying riya of Australia’s Murdoch University counted many former officers among its the armed forces and their logistical abil- calls the “normalisation” of military leaders. The president’s personal net- ities makes sense—besides, the armed influence in the civilian sphere, as infor- work is rooted not just in his family (his forces are widely admired. Yet it is weird mal networks become formal under Mr elder brother, Mahinda, now prime for them to police a dubious liquor ban Rajapaksa. The normalisation extends to minister, was himself president from imposed by the teetotal president. And business, where—as has long been the 2005 to 2015). Gota commands the loyalty their enforcement of quarantine areas case in, for example, Myanmar—military of past and present soldiers, a band of with hazmat suits and assault rifles is types prosper alongside a new, assertive brothers from his time fighting a horrif- surely overkill. Moreover, the command- bourgeoisie grown rich on the back of ic, long-running civil war against Tamil ers’ claims of covid-competence have been property and infrastructure deals, much insurgents, first as an officer and latterly undermined by outbreaks on military of it lubricated by Chinese loans. Former as the powerful secretary of defence bases. Of 900-odd reported cases in Sri officers advise on projects’ security, under Mahinda. while the army gets involved in slum clearance to make way for development. After the war, the army and intelli- Academics and journalists say they are gence played a big role in public life and, afraid to investigate the business links. most Sri Lankans assumed, in the disap- pearance of critics of the government, Thus does Sri Lanka lurch further until Mahinda was unexpectedly defeat- from liberal democracy. Gota has in the ed in the presidential election of 2015. Yet past railed at Banyan about the unfair- few predicted the extent to which under ness of external critics. He has no time Gota’s rule military types would move for the un’s call for an investigation into into senior positions in government, crimes that may have been committed in development and even health, fighting the closing days of the civil war. He de- the covid-19 epidemic. fends General Silva, who was banned from America earlier this year over sus- In a tally by the International Truth pected involvement in extra-judicial and Justice Project, a human-rights killings. As he and his band of brothers group, current or former officers include have long seen it, having saved Sri Lanka the president’s chief-of-staff and the from fracturing, they are entitled to an heads of national intelligence, prisons outsize role in its future. With military and prisoner rehabilitation. Generals, efficiency, they are taking it.

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws China The Economist May 16th 2020 33 Mental health mental health in the country’s long-term development goals. A mental-health law, Picking up the pieces passed in 2012, advised against the previ- ously common practice of confining peo- BEIJING ple in psychiatric wards against their will. The government’s “Healthy China 2030” Covid-19 has focused attention on a previously neglected problem plan, issued in 2016, called for a stronger “mental-health service system”. Late in january Shen Yinjing, a thera- Such attention reflects a profound pist in Shanghai, volunteered to help change in official and public attitudes. Un- These days many Chinese recognise distressed people in the coronavirus- der Mao Zedong, modern approaches to that mental-health problems are common. stricken city of Wuhan by offering counsel- psychology and psychiatry were sup- Zhiying Ma of the University of Chicago ling over the phone or by text. Before long pressed. Mental ailments were treated as a says that young Chinese, in particular, have she was running an online support group deficiency of revolutionary zeal—nothing grown comfortable using terms such as de- for people being treated in one of Wuhan’s that earnest study of the chairman’s works pression and anxiety when talking about makeshift hospitals for covid-19 patients. couldn’t cure. In the post-Mao era political their difficulties. A Chinese government- Now Ms Shen wonders how she should as- taboos surrounding mental health were funded survey published in 2019 found that sist those bereaved by the disease. She wor- lifted. But cultural ones persisted. Among such disorders were becoming more com- ries that many people will not think to ask citizens, psychological problems re- mon in China. The study’s authors suggest- for help, even though the loss of a loved one mained shrouded in shame. The govern- ed that “rapid social change” was intensify- can cause lasting mental trauma. ment still paid little attention to develop- ing “psychological pressure and stress”. ing expertise in the science. It tended to Ms Shen is among a small army of men- regard those with psychiatric disorders as At the same time, mental-health coun- tal-health professionals who have provid- potential troublemakers rather than as selling has become more widely available, ed support during the coronavirus out- people in need of sympathetic care. particularly for those willing to pay for break, which reached a peak in China in private treatment. Between 2002 and 2018 January and February. Hundreds of univer- In recent years, however, the govern- more than 1m people completed brief gov- sities and charities have set up “psycholog- ment has begun to stress the importance of ernment-certified courses in counselling ical hotlines” for people suffering from ail- skills. A devastating earthquake that struck ments such as anxiety and depression. Also in this section the south-western province of Sichuan in Their efforts have enjoyed strong backing 2008, killing more than 60,000 people, from the government, which has issued 34 The missing lama helped to promote interest in work involv- dozens of directives to guide the mental- ing psychology. In its wake, more Chinese health response to the epidemic. 35 Chaguan: Keeping it local took up careers as therapists. Mental-health workers who have re- sponded to the covid-19 outbreak appear better-organised and better-trained than1

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws 34 China The Economist May 16th 2020 2 the volunteers who flocked to care for vic- Tibet Panchen Lamas have important roles in tims of the earthquake, says Huang Hsuan- identifying each other’s reincarnations. Ying of the Chinese University of Hong The lost boy Kong. During the covid crisis, counsellors The boy, whom activists would call “the have formed online networks to co-ordi- China angrily shrugs off a new world’s youngest political prisoner”, has nate their efforts to help the afflicted. Yu American law, and a sad anniversary not been seen in public since. Occasionally, Zhihong, a professor of social work at Wu- China has tersely declared that he is living han University, set up one such group. Its To the great wall of mutual suspicion life as “normal”. In 1995 it named its own members provide psychological support and recrimination that divides China candidate as the 11th Panchen, Gyaltsen for nearly 30 people who lost loved ones to and the United States, the American Senate Norbu, who appears in public occasionally, the virus. Ms Yu says some of them are suf- is adding another brick. As The Economist but lacks credibility among Tibetans. fering from feelings of guilt, believing they went to press, its foreign-relations com- were the source of a fatal infection, or wor- mittee was about to discuss the Tibet Policy Exiled activists see the anniversary as a rying that they did not do enough to help a and Support Act, a piece of bipartisan legis- chance to remind the world of China’s bru- person who died. lation that was passed by the House of Rep- tality in Tibet and the hollowness of its But Ms Yu says that some people are re- resentatives in January. When, as seems promises of “autonomy” there. But in Tibet luctant to seek help from her network. She likely, it becomes law, China will be furi- itself, the day will pass without notice. The says this may be because grief is a private ous. It regards its conduct in Tibet as above region has emerged from its covid-19 lock- family matter in Chinese culture, and stig- criticism by meddling foreigners. down into the political lockdown that ma still surrounds those who seek help passes for normal life there. The official from mental-health professionals. Among other measures, the law would media are indulging in a propaganda blitz There remain far too few such special- make it American policy that only Tibetan around a new law, passed by the regional ists to cope with China’s needs. The coun- Buddhists can choose their religious lead- assembly in January, that came into effect try has about two registered psychiatrists ers, including an eventual successor to the on May 1st: “Regulations on the Establish- per 100,000 citizens, only about a sixth of most senior of them all, the Dalai Lama, ment of a Model Area for Ethnic Unity and the number in rich countries. Few Chinese who is 84 and lives in exile in India. The law Progress in the Tibet Autonomous Region”. have access to top-notch primary health would demand that sanctions be imposed care, so mild mental problems can go un- on any Chinese official who attempts to Matthew Akester, a Tibet researcher detected until they are severe. Hospitals do control the process of finding the Dalai’s based in India, says the regulations, under not offer good care, either. Doctors often Lama’s reincarnation. Odd as it seems, Chi- which government and private organisa- prescribe drugs, even when more subtle na’s avowedly atheist government is in- tions must “strengthen ethnic unity” and treatment, such as psychotherapy, might deed intent on fixing the outcome. In 2007 combat separatism, contain nothing new. suffice. That is in part because they lack ex- it issued “management measures for the Rather, they formalise a trend in China’s pertise and in part because it is more prof- reincarnation of living Buddhas”. policy towards its ethnic minorities. This itable to dispense pills. stresses “unity” rather than diversity, let The mental-health system that the gov- An anniversary this month recalls how alone autonomy. Tibetan exiles fear that, ernment says it is building would make it seriously China takes Tibetan religious by promoting intermarriage between Ti- easier for ordinary Chinese to receive succession. On May 17th, 25 years ago, betans and Han Chinese, Han migration counselling in local clinics or schools. The Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, a six-year-old boy, into Tibet and the urbanisation of Tibet, rich southern city of Shenzhen is one of was taken along with his parents from their China aims to eradicate Tibetan identity. about 30 places that were instructed in 2019 home in Tibet. Three days earlier, in a cere- to pilot such reforms. By the end of this mony in northern India, the Dalai Lama No American law is going to deter China year it plans to have a staffed “psycholog- had proclaimed him as the 11th Panchen from trying. But neither will Tibet’s new ical counselling room” in all of its larger lo- Lama, the second-most senior monk in the regulations change an enduring fact: the cal clinics. By the end of 2021 it aims to hierarchy, the tenth of whom had died in strongest symbol of Tibet’s identity re- make counselling available in 85% of prim- 1989. In Tibetan tradition, the Dalai and mains the Dalai Lama himself and the hold ary and secondary schools. he has on Tibetan loyalties, despite 61 years The reforms may help. But officials of- Man proposes, but the party disposes in exile. As China should have learnt from ten refer to them not as a way of boosting the history of the Panchen Lamas, the Com- public health, but as a means of improving munist Party will never be accepted by Ti- “social governance”—in other words, betans as the arbiter of their faith. 7 strengthening control. It is possible that the counselling rooms will provide some assistance to people who are suffering, but also make it easier for the government to keep tabs on unhappy people. Stories from Wuhan provide reasons to be sceptical. Grieving relatives report that they have been obliged to take government officials with them when they bury ashes, perhaps to ensure that funerals are kept brief and low key. Members of one family were ordered by police to delete an online group they had created in order to help be- reaved people connect with each other. The government wants Chinese to talk more about their emotions, but not if they say the wrong things. 7

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Economist May 16th 2020 China 35 Chaguan Keeping it local Lessons in globalisation, from the small Chinese town that makes half of Japan’s coffins Since ancient times, Chinese poets have revered the purple- dominated by a single Chinese city or county. flowering paotong as something rare: a tree in which a phoenix The coffin-makers of Zhuangzhai, a leafy township of 100,000 will land. Musicians cherish lutes made from its wood. The fast- growing plant, often used in sandy areas prone to soil erosion, people in the eastern province of Shandong, are a case in point. Be- even has a place in the Communist Party’s iconography. It is the tween them, Zhuangzhai’s three main manufacturers export subject of a rare poem by President Xi Jinping, who wrote of water- 740,000 coffins annually, almost all of them to Japan. With just ing a paotong with his tears, shed in memory of a Mao-era official under 1.4m deaths in Japan last year, that gives one Chinese town- who battled cancer to supervise mass-planting of the tree. ship something around half the Japanese coffin market. Chaguan, a flintier-hearted sort, would like to propose the pao- But when Japanese television journalists visited Zhuangzhai in tong (Paulownia elongata to botanists) as a metaphor for something 2017, they treated its share of the market as cause for larky curiosity less romantic: a distinctive Chinese business model that rarely rather than alarm. Their calm reflected the obvious synergies be- makes international headlines, but which has helped to power the tween Japan and this corner of Shandong. The largest local firm is country’s rise. Governments everywhere are debating the future of Yunlong Woodcarving, which ships 20,000 coffins to Japan each globalisation in general, and dependence on China in particular. month. Its 56-year-old founder, Li Ruqi, has coffin-making in the Politicians and ceos fret about supply chains that cross oceans in blood. His grandfather and father made caskets as well as furniture search of value, but that now look vulnerable to trade barriers for locals, defying the superstitious horror that many rural Chi- thrown up by pandemics or ideological disputes. nese feel for anything linked to death. In 1995 his firm began sup- plying a Japanese coffin-maker with panels decorated with phoe- In Washington, China hawks talk of “decoupling”, unveiling nixes and lotus flowers. Most were carved from the wood of the plans that would see medicines, microchips and other sensitive paotong, which grows all around Zhuangzhai. Historically, Chi- products made in America again. In Japan the government has ear- nese preferred coffins of heavy cypress or cedar. They thought of marked $2bn to help firms move high-value production back paotong wood, which is creamy in colour and light in weight, as fit home from China. Meanwhile, Chinese officials seem bent on only for burying the poor. In modern Japan, where cremation in trampling their own country’s reputation for reliability. Chinese pale-coloured coffins is the norm, paotong is ideal. diplomats, playing the role of nationalist “wolf warriors”, have or- dered foreign governments to offer vocal thanks if they wish to buy Yunlong began making complete coffins for export in 2000, as Chinese medical equipment. Chinese ambassadors have threat- labour costs in an ageing Japan soared to ten or 20 times those ened trade boycotts against countries that displease the party’s found in Zhuangzhai. Back then Mr Li’s Chinese workers were in leaders in Beijing. On May 12th a Chinese spokesman announced a their 20s, freshly graduated from local schools. In contrast, when ban on many beef imports from Australia. The official cited food- Mr Li visited his Japanese customers, their workshops “didn’t have safety reasons, but almost in the same breath condemned Austra- a lot of young people”. Now China is catching up. With about one in lia’s “erroneous words and deeds” in calling for an international nine citizens over 65, China is at the point on the ageing curve that probe into the origins of covid-19. Japan hit in 1987. Today Mr Li’s 600 workers are mostly in their late 30s and 40s. Youngsters prefer service-sector jobs, he sighs. In this turbulent moment, the paotong tree is a timely reminder that globalisation, China-style, does not always involve globe- Cold commercial logic sent Japanese coffin-makers to Zhuang- spanning supply chains of the sort now causing so much political zhai. Shandong offered skilled artisans, easy access to the right angst. Since the country embraced capitalism more than 30 years trees and a good climate for woodwork—neither dry nor too hu- ago, its astonishing growth has also been driven by an intensely lo- mid. Japanese clients came with “very high requirements”, Mr Li calised variety of globalisation, in which a specific export sector is recalls without resentment. Over the years his firm and its cus- tomers have innovated, using hollow panels so that a single tree now provides the wood for 20 coffins or more, rather than two or three as was once the case. In one corner, workers are checking a new line of flat-pack coffins. With their pegs and holes and drop-in end panels, they eerily resemble caskets that ikea might make. Mr Li demonstrates the way that two small doors in each coffin lid would open to reveal the face of the deceased. Their hinges must be perfectly silent or risk causing tremendous offence, he explains. Demographics trumps politics Mr Li is unfazed by talk of the rich world decoupling from China. Some Japanese clients did try sourcing coffins in Vietnam and In- donesia, he concedes. But they found that workers in South-East Asia lacked “discipline”, so returned to Shandong. His corner of China has paotong trees, skilled labour and trusted suppliers. “Price-wise, talent-wise, this place is pretty far ahead,” he says. Demography is a bigger worry. It is not just Zhuangzhai’s work- ers who are ageing. With more than one in four Japanese over 65, coffin sales are brisk. But clients from Japan remind Mr Li that Ja- pan’s population is shrinking fast. “They told me I’ve got about 30 years in this line of business,” he says. China’s hyper-local version of globalisation may prove surprisingly resilient in the face of de- coupling. But some storms will overcome the deepest roots. 7

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Economist May 16th 2020 36 Middle East & Africa Also in this section 37 Ballot-dodging in Africa 38 Ethiopia’s crisis 38 A family feud in Syria 39 Saudi television during Ramadan Covid-19 in Africa and sheep samples that tested positive. (The lab denies this.) No new official data The long game have been released since April 29th. JOHANNESBURG Opposition activists and ngos say that there have been dozens of burials of co- Why the pandemic seems to spread more slowly in Africa vid-19 victims in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city. On May 12th the American em- It was not what fishermen usually mean doubling about every three days. bassy said that hospitals there were “over- by a good catch. Last month a worker at a This may partly reflect insufficient test- whelmed”. “It is a cover-up,” says Zitto Kab- fish factory in Tema, a port city in Ghana, we, an opposition leader. infected 533 people with the virus behind ing. Africa has checked just over 1m peo- covid-19. President Nana Akufo-Addo ple—a day’s work for officials in Wuhan. There are similar reports of undocu- linked the “super-spreader” to about10% of South Africa and Ghana account for nearly mented surges in other countries. In Kano, the country’s 5,408 cases. half. The Partnership for Evidence-Based in northern Nigeria, hundreds of un- Response to Covid-19, a public-health con- explained deaths have been alleged by That Ghana could identify the person is sortium, notes that “the true number of in- gravediggers. In Mogadishu, the capital of a tribute to its response. It has tested more fections is likely to be much greater than Somalia, medics claim that the deaths they than 155,000 people, the fourth-highest currently known.” Its rough estimate sug- are seeing do not chime with official totals. per-person rate in Africa, according to data gests a tally eight times higher. from cdc Africa, a public-health body. Else- Nevertheless there are few signs that where a lack of testing makes it harder to Another sign of undercounting is the these “ghost hotspots” are ubiquitous. assess the true course of the disease. But share of covid-19 tests coming back posi- Some countries, including Mauritius, Na- what data there are, and new analysis by tive. The “test-positivity-rate” is an imper- mibia and the Seychelles, have not report- the World Health Organisation (who), sug- fect guide. But assuming those being tested ed a new case for two weeks. Ethiopia, gest the virus is spreading more slowly in have covid-like symptoms, a rate above Rwanda and Uganda have fewer than 700 Africa than elsewhere—and that its path 5-10% suggests there are many uncounted cases between them and positive-test rates will vary across the continent. cases, says Jason Andrews of Stanford Uni- below 1%. Nor are there reports of surges. versity. At least 22 African countries have “In a society like ours there’s simply no way Africa, which contains about 17% of the rates above 10%, including Algeria (91%), this could be kept secret,” says Berhanu world’s population, has less than 2% of its Sudan (87%) and Tanzania (78%). Nega, an Ethiopian opposition leader. confirmed cases of covid-19. By May 13th cdc Africa had counted 69,947 cases and John Magufuli, Tanzania’s president, Crucial in slowing the early spread of 2,410 deaths. Over the past month reported does not believe his country’s results. “We covid-19 was the swift introduction of con- cases have doubled roughly every two only see them releasing positive, positive, tainment measures. Most African coun- weeks. Until recently American cases were positive results,” he said. He claims that the tries implemented lockdowns far earlier national laboratory was sent papaya, goat than rich countries did. By the end of April at least 42 African countries had done so; 38 of these were in place for at least 21 days. So despite undercounting, official data1

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Economist May 16th 2020 Middle East & Africa 37 2 are still a rough reflection of reality in Elections 1 many countries, say those leading the re- sponse. “While covid-19 likely won’t spread We don’t need no observation as exponentially in Africa as it has else- where in the world, it likely will smoulder NAIROBI in transmission hotspots,” says Matshidiso Moeti, the director for the who in Africa. The pandemic offers cover for ballot-dodgers Her view of a slower, longer pandemic is explained in a paper by who colleagues, Strongmen tend to find election ob- Mr Nkurunziza has been less strict published by bmj Global Health on May servers rather a nuisance. The sharper- when it comes to protecting his own peo- 14th. Unlike other models, which tend to eyed ones make trickery harder to get away ple from the virus. Beyond quarantining apply patterns seen elsewhere in the world with. Which is why autocrats see an upside observers, his regime has imposed few re- to Africa, theirs claims to make assump- to covid-19. These days, even the nosiest strictions. Bars, restaurants and churches tions based on the continent’s “unique so- monitors are disinclined to travel. remain open. Burundi has been the only cio-ecological context”. For example, it African country to continue top-tier foot- takes into account the fact that Africans Alpha Condé, Guinea’s president, has ball. Games were suspended on April 13th, travel less, thanks to sparse road networks. taken full advantage of the pandemic. On but only so that stadiums could be used for The authors reckon that without con- March 22nd he pressed ahead with a parlia- campaign rallies. Fixtures will resume the tainment measures 16-26% of those in the mentary vote he had postponed four times day after the poll. “The coronavirus is kill- who Africa region would be infected in the before. The coronavirus was apparently ing people everywhere else,” said General first year, with higher shares in well-con- not a good enough reason to warrant a fifth Evariste Ndayishimye, the party apparat- nected countries like South Africa. About delay. Foreign observers, who had previ- chik the president has chosen to succeed 29m-44m people would be symptomatic. ously raised concerns about possible tam- him. He told supporters not to worry: “Do This is a lower estimate than other models pering with the electoral register, stayed not be afraid. God loves Burundi.” yield. The who also calculates that there away, as did the opposition, who declared a would be 83,000–190,000 deaths without boycott. Mr Condé’s ruling party’s share of Opposition types are less keen on the mitigating steps—implying a lower rate of seats in parliament duly rose to more than absence of monitors. Agathon Rwasa, Bu- infected people dying than in rich coun- two-thirds. Because the president also rundi’s foremost opposition candidate, tries, mostly because Africans are younger. slipped in a referendum on relaxing term suggests that many abuses are now going However, Africa does not have rich coun- limits, Guineans may now enjoy his rule undocumented. His supporters are being tries’ hospitals. Surges in cases would over- until 2032, when he will be 94. intimidated. Several have been attacked, whelm health systems. arrested or even murdered. He also com- Because the model assumes no mitigat- President Pierre Nkurunziza of Burundi plains that the electoral commission has ing measures such as lockdowns, the actu- is similarly determined not to let the virus not published voter lists, which makes al tallies should be lower. Yet many African stop his people having their say. Burundi- them easier to manipulate. governments are in the midst of loosening ans will crowd into polling stations on May restrictions, as they try to balance the harm 20th to choose a new president and parlia- Given that the commission is almost of covid-19 with that to their economies ment. Most observers are planning to stay entirely made up of members of the ruling and public health more broadly. Research- away, which suits Mr Nkurunziza just fine. cndd-fdd, election officials are under no ers at Imperial College London reckon that Nonetheless,12 days before the election his pressure to listen to Mr Rwasa. Besides, in some countries the knock-on effects on government took no chances, telling the many opposition supporters may never get treatment for hiv, tb and malaria could be East African Community that any monitors the chance to cast their ballots anyway. Vot- of the same order of magnitude, in terms of it might still think of sending would have er cards are doled out by local chiefs. As years of life lost, as that of covid-19. to spend 14 days in quarantine. these also all belong to the cndd-fdd, they1 Many rich countries are easing lock- downs after reaching, in theory, peaks in new cases. African countries may be doing so while case-rates accelerate. Africa seems to be suffering a slower pandemic, but the risks are still immense. 7 Behind the curve Covid-19, confirmed cases, 2020, log scale United States 10,000,000 Europe 1,000,000 100,000 Asia 10,000 Americas 1,000 MENA* Sub-Saharan Africa 100 Jan Feb Mar Apr May† Source: Johns Hopkins *Middle East and north Africa University CSSE †To 6am GMT May 14th

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws 38 Middle East & Africa The Economist May 16th 2020 2 are inclined to give the cards only to those Ethiopia sory body to the upper house of parlia- known to be party supporters. ment, which is controlled by the ruling There is little the opposition can do Democracy delayed party, notes Zemelak Ayele of Ethiopia’s about any of this. So Mr Nkurunziza, who Centre for Federal Studies. has had himself named “Eternal Supreme ADDIS ABABA Guide” and may attempt to rule through his Although the constitution does not successor, is likely to see his gamble pay Postponed elections portend spell out the circumstances under which off. His nominee, General Ndayishimye, is constitutional limbo an election may be postponed, it still pro- all but certain to win. vides a “framework” allowing it , says Adem Others will pay the price. Packing voters Even in normal times Ethiopia’s plans K Abebe, an expert based in The Hague. But into campaign rallies and polling stations to hold national elections in August such legal subtleties may count for little is hardly sensible during a pandemic, as would have been fraught with uncertainty. without the support of opposition leaders. Guinea’s example shows. The country had Would they be free and fair? Would they To get this Abiy may have to bargain with been relatively unscathed by covid-19 help restore peace to a country riven by eth- them on matters such as the timing of the when voters went to the polls, with just two nic violence? Now, with the polls post- election, as well as allay their concerns cases recorded. It is now the eighth-worst poned indefinitely by covid-19, Ethiopia is about its fairness and the independence of affected in Africa, with more than 2,300 re- approaching a constitutional crisis. state media and the security forces. corded cases. The head of Guinea’s elector- al commission and Mr Condé’s chief of By law Ethiopia’s parliament will reach Jawar Mohammed, a popular figure staff are among the 14 who have died. The the end of its constitutional five-year term among the Oromo ethnic group, wants opposition now accuses the president of on September 30th. That could leave the Abiy to start talks about a caretaker admin- spreading the virus. country without a legitimate parliament or istration taking charge until elections are Burundi, too, has apparently had rela- government. Abiy Ahmed, a young reform- held, among other matters. Abiy has met tively few cases—only15 confirmed ones by er who took office in 2018 promising de- his opponents once to discuss the consti- May 13th, though just 284 tests had been mocracy after massive protests, says that tutional impasse. But he has dismissed conducted. As in Guinea, those numbers because of the exceptional circumstances calls for an interim government and could easily jump. If they do, the presi- of the pandemic his government will stay warned that “illegal elections” will “harm dent’s cynicism will be partly to blame. in charge until elections can be held safely. the country and the people”. There is a risk, Covid-19 is the excuse that keeps giving. however, that without a compromise his John Magufuli, Tanzania’s president, is The delay has prompted a backlash prophecies become self-fulfilling. 7 likely to press ahead with an election in from opposition leaders. Many of them had October, when he is expected to fend off a suspected long before the outbreak of co- Syria browbeaten opposition. Though he is as vid-19 that Abiy’s Prosperity Party would try casual as President Nkurunziza about the to rig or postpone the elections: its prede- Family feud virus, he could use it as an excuse to block cessor suppressed the opposition so thor- foreign observers. This would be particu- oughly in 2015 that it won 95% of the vote. Trouble in Bashar al-Assad’s own ranks larly handy in Zanzibar, a restive island where elections were annulled in 2015 be- The Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front In 1957 a young air-force officer from the cause of foul play. (tplf), which called the shots in the coun- highlands called Hafez al-Assad married The virus can also furnish a pretext for try for nearly three decades until it was a girl from the coast named Anisa Makh- dodging a ballot entirely. Uganda’s Yoweri ousted by Abiy, accused the prime minister louf. It seemed a good fit: Assad was ambi- Museveni says it would be “madness” to of exploiting the pandemic to dismantle tious; the Makhloufs were powerful. And hold elections scheduled for next year. He the constitution and lay the groundwork indeed, after Assad took over in a coup in would probably win them because they are for one-man rule. It said it will press ahead 1970 the two clans ran the country like a unlikely to be free or fair. Even so, Mr Mu- with polls in Tigray, the region it still con- family business, propelling their esoteric seveni is nervous. If he held an unfair vote trols, in defiance of the federal govern- Muslim sect, the Alawites, from Syria’s and still failed to win convincingly, he ment. This squabble will further pull at the backwaters to the centre of power. could face calls from within his own party seams of a federation that has been badly to stand down. fraying in recent years. Half a century on, though, the partner- Malawi’s president, Peter Mutharika, ship is unravelling. In a series of videos risks defeat in an election on July 2nd that To avert a showdown the government posted on Facebook Rami Makhlouf, Syr- he is being dragged kicking into. In Febru- has asked the Council of Constitutional In- ia’s wealthiest tycoon, accused his cousin ary judges annulled his victory in a poll last quiry for an opinion on the postponement. and Hafez’s son, President Bashar al-Assad, year after finding evidence of vote-rigging, But this is not an independent constitu- of confiscating his assets. Mr Makhlouf and ordered a re-run. On May 8th they tional court. The council is merely an advi- even complained, unironically, that the threw out his “embarrassing” and “unpro- blood-soaked security forces, which he fessional” appeal. Red long sponsored, were treating his employ- Mali’s ruling party felt obliged last ees in “an inhumane way” and “attacking month to go ahead with an election even ERITREA Sea the people’s freedoms”. though it expected to lose seats. It did not try to stop the ballot because it knew that SUDAN Tigray Things had been moving against Mr without a new parliament, a peace deal Makhlouf for a while. The death of Anisa in with separatists could not go ahead. DJIBOUTI 2016 deprived his clan of protection. Maher Many Big Men are trying to exploit the al-Assad, the president’s younger brother pandemic. The key to stopping their she- ETHIOPIA and commander of the Republican Guard, nanigans, in times of sickness as in those coveted his business empire. The presi- of health, is independent judges, uppity ac- Addis dent’s wife, Asma, wanted to empower her1 tivists and brave voters. 7 Ababa SOUTH SUDAN UGANDA KENYA SOMALIA 300 km

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Economist May 16th 2020 Middle East & Africa 39 Saudi television Series of changes Unfriended by Bashar BEIRUT 2 own clique and improve the prospects of on anxiously. Mr Makhlouf has “always A new vision of society, minus the anxiety their 19-year-old son, Hafez. In his most re- been close to the Iranians”, says the asso- cent post Mr Makhlouf (pictured) seemed ciate. “He put all his eggs in the Iranian bas- In a world flipped on its head, a note to blame her for his misfortune. ket.” But Iran itself has bigger problems. of constancy: the Middle East is But the biggest reason for Mr Makh- The assassination in January of Qassem Su- arguing about Israel. “Exit 7”, a popular louf’s fall is the president’s need for money leimani, the commander of its foreign op- series aired on Saudi television this after nine years of civil war that have devas- erations, and mounting financial trouble Ramadan, portrays a family led by tated the economy. In December the gov- have made it harder for Iran to maintain its Nasser al-Gassabi, a Saudi actor. One ernment began seizing the businessman’s position in Syria. Israel has been increas- episode has his son Ziad befriend an assets, citing “customs violations”. The ing its air strikes on Iranian bases in the Israeli, via an online video game. True shakedown came to a head last month country and says Iran is retreating. to life, the friendship is cause for con- when goons raided Syriatel, the country’s troversy. But not everyone is perturbed. biggest mobile-network provider, owned Russia, which also backs Mr Assad, may Mr Gassabi’s on-screen father-in-law by Mr Makhlouf. Senior managers were ar- not mind seeing Iran go. It wants its own describes Israel as a reality and the rested and the state demanded at least companies to benefit from reconstruction Palestinians as ungrateful “enemies”. $170m in licence fees. It was all part of an contracts in Syria. The s-300 air-defence anti-corruption drive, said Mr Assad. system that it gave the regime never seems Autocrats in the Middle East use Normally the regime puts guns in the to work against Israeli missiles. Analysts television to push politics—especially mouths of troublemakers and calls it sui- say Russia is acquiescing in, if not facilitat- during Ramadan, when big-budget cide. But Mr Makhlouf poses an unusual ing, the strikes on Iranian positions. It has series attract hours of post-prandial challenge. His clan is larger than Mr As- also moved its forces into areas prized by viewing. In Egypt scripts are vetted for sad’s and is part of the powerful Haddadin Iran and cut it out of negotiations over patriotic themes. Turkey and the uae, tribe. Mr Makhlouf has courted their loyal- northern Syria, where rebels backed by regional rivals, recently made duelling ty throughout the war. In 2012 he formed Turkey continue to hold territory and the shows about the Ottoman empire: the Bustan Association, a charity with an Kurds have carved out a proto-state. benevolent overlords in the former; armed wing, to protect and care for his unwanted occupiers in the latter. Crit- kinsmen. It provided meals, health care With the regime in disarray some think ics say “Exit 7” and another Saudi show, and jobs—until Mr Assad curbed some of Mr Assad might be more willing to negoti- “Um Haroun”, which features Jewish its activities last year. ate a political solution with the rebels. Rus- characters, are attempts to promote Alawite hardliners bewail the downfall sia wants a settlement in order to convince normalisation with Israel. of Mr Makhlouf, whom they consider their Western powers to help fund reconstruc- protector. Some suggest the president is tion. Under one (optimistic) scenario, Mr But much of “Exit 7” deals with forsaking his own sect for the predomi- Assad would accept a new constitution that changing mores in Saudi Arabia. It nantly Sunni merchants who are close to devolves powers to a more conciliatory begins with Mr Gassabi donning a bisht, his wife (also a Sunni). Most Alawites have prime minister ahead of presidential elec- a ceremonial cloak, before going to lost loved ones fighting for Mr Assad, so tions next year. receive a promotion. “This is the cloak they cringe at the thought of him handing of responsibility,” he gloats. The twist: the war’s spoils to Sunnis, many of whom Good luck with that. Mr Assad appears not only is he passed over for the job, rebelled against him. “Alawites feel threat- as stubborn as ever. Russian diplomats but his new boss is a woman. Another ened and will rally around Rami,” says a paint him as a disobedient client. Criticism show, “Ureem”, focuses on a layabout business associate of Mr Makhlouf. “If [the of him is increasing in Russian media. forced to work as a taxi driver, the sort security forces] go after him, they risk de- Some reports even suggest that President of job once reserved for migrants. stabilising the regime.” Vladimir Putin would prefer to deal with Iran, which backs the regime, is looking someone else. But no alternative has The shows, though, dance around emerged. No matter how much Mr Assad the kingdom’s current anxieties. On alienates his allies—and his own people— May 11th the state announced austerity they appear stuck with him. 7 measures to blunt the budgetary shocks of a pandemic and low oil prices. It tripled the value-added tax. Civil servants lost a 1,000-rial ($266) monthly stipend. Unsurprisingly, the decree was not prime-time television: it came just after dawn. Muhammad bin Salman, the crown prince, wagers that he can fashion a new society from the top down. Many of his changes, from letting women drive to permitting concerts, were long sought by Saudis. Looming economic changes will be more jarring. Gener- ations of Saudis were insulated from market-based wages and competitive pressures. Some will face lower living standards. A whimsical tv show will not assuage them.

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws 40 Europe The Economist May 16th 2020 Also in this section 41 Sweden and covid-19 41 How many in North Macedonia? 42 Naval strategy in the Arctic 43 Charlemagne: Kraftwerk’s Europe France leaves lockdown Much of the complexity of organising One is the adversarial nature of labour this is not unique to France. The sourcing relations, combined with the French state’s Free at last of masks, the spacing of seats on public enduring appetite for bureaucracy. Unions transport or in classrooms, the distribu- enjoy an entrenched role through manda- PARIS tion of hand gel in shops and offices: these tory works councils. President Emmanuel problems are shared by all countries exit- Macron simplified these, and merged even But now the arguing begins ing lockdown. Yet, as the court decision more tangled former structures into a sin- against Renault shows, France also faces gle comité social et économique. But firms On the estuary of the river Seine in some quite specific difficulties. with over ten employees still have to hold Normandy, the Renault factory at San- monthly or bi-monthly meetings, partly to douville lies silent and empty. Usually, the En route, slowly 80 discuss issues concerning employee well- 1,900 workers at this plant turn out 132,000 60 being. Talks are often long, and testy. vehicles a year, mostly delivery vans. But Paris congestion, increase in travel time on May 7th a court in Le Havre ordered Re- compared with uncongested conditions, % In preparing déconfinement, bosses re- nault not to reopen fully as planned on May port vastly more such consultations. The 11th, when France began its déconfinement, 2019 director of a services firm in the Paris re- or emergence from lockdown. It upheld a gion says that he has spent a full day each complaint brought by the Confédération 40 week on discussions to prepare for the re- Générale du Travail, a union with historical turn of just ten employees (out of 95) to the links to the Communist Party, that the firm 20 office. The government has produced a 20- had not followed procedure for consulting page “national déconfinement protocol”, employees about reopening. Pending an 567 89 2020 0 with guidelines on how, for instance, to appeal, the factory remains shut. Source: TomTom May calculate the new minimum workspace per 10 11 12 employee (four square metres). “It’s really After eight weeks of confinement, complicated,” says Jérôme, who runs a France was supposed to resume work this hairdressing salon. He has had to take out week. Forms for permission to pop to the five of the12 seats in his salon and says each shops have been binned. Public transport haircut—much in demand after eight was running at 75% of normal in Paris, with weeks—is taking an extra 15 minutes be- masks compulsory. Hairdressers, clothes cause of the time it takes to disinfect shops, bookstores and all other com- things. The price of not applying the rules merce—except restaurants and cafés— can be high. The court ruled against Re- were allowed to reopen. Some primary- nault partly because the firm had organ- school pupils returned to class. It was “es- ised a works-council meeting by email sential” for the economy to get going again, rather than, as the rules state, by post. said Bruno Le Maire, the finance minister. Furthermore, both company bosses and elected officials are criminally liable while in their jobs. Just five months ago a court1

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Economist May 16th 2020 Europe 41 2 sentenced France Telecom’s former boss to Controlling covid-19 sisted the temptation. It banned gatherings a year in prison (with eight months sus- of more than 50 people. But nurseries and pended) in a criminal case brought after The Swedish way schools for children under 16 have re- the suicide of several employees over a de- mained open (with older students tele- cade ago. In normal times, this breeds cau- Sweden shunned a hard lockdown. Was learning from home). Bars, restaurants and tion. Under covid-19, as managers scrub of- that wise? gyms also stayed open, though with social- fices and install plexiglass partitions, even distancing rules. People were asked to more so. After much lobbying, the liability As bleary-eyed Europeans squint in the work from home if they could. And the el- has been limited a bit for employers and sun, freshly released from coronavirus derly, who are most at risk of dying if in- mayors, but only during the crisis. lockdowns, worries about a second wave of fected, were told to stay at home to protect Already, an astonishing 63 legal com- infections are on everybody’s mind. Life themselves. plaints have been filed against ministers, cannot return completely to normal until a including Edouard Philippe, the prime vaccine is available. What sort of semi-nor- Sweden chose this path because it minister, and Olivier Véran, the health mal life might work in the meantime is the looked at the longer term, says Johan Gie- minister. Many of the complaints are big question. Sweden may hold the answer. secke, an epidemiologist advising the au- bound to be dismissed. But ministers thorities. Full lockdowns are stop-gap could yet be hauled before a special court. In March, when governments across measures, he says, and European govern- In 1999 a contaminated-blood case was Europe seemed to be competing to impose ments rushed to put them in place without brought against Laurent Fabius, a former the toughest anti-viral measures—from plans for what would replace them. prime minister. He was charged with man- closing borders to forbidding people from slaughter, but acquitted in court. That he venturing out even for a walk—Sweden re- Swedes have been sensible. Use of pub- faced such grave charges in the first place lic transport has fallen significantly. A scares decision-makers today. third of people say they avoid going to their Still, many people are itching to go back workplace (by working from home, for ex- to work. “I’m really relieved to be back, I ample)—up from 10% in mid-March. Daily1 couldn’t bear confinement,” says Joseph cheerfully on his first day back at a men’s North Macedonia outfitter in Paris. While shops were shut he was on chômage partiel, a furlough scheme Lies, damned lies… under which the government paid 84% of his wages. Now he is back on full salary. …and Macedonian statistics Elsewhere in France, Renault has partially reopened car factories without difficulty. It is an odd admission for the boss of a 1.8m, says Izet Zeqiri, an economist. Many office staff continue le télétravail, or national statistical agency. Not only are Until there is a census, no one will know. work from home, easing pressure on trains many of his numbers wrong, says Apos- and buses. Despite the anxiety, 1.5m prim- tol Simovski, head of North Macedonia’s The last count was in 2002. An at- ary-school pupils, or roughly one in five, statistical office, but he has no idea what tempt to update it in 2011 turned into a have filed back to the classroom. the right ones might be. Officially, there fiasco. Nationalist Macedonian poli- Yet there is an underlying fearfulness, are 2.08m people in his country. In fact, ticians and those from the country’s which Yann Algan, an economist at Sci- he says: “I am afraid there are no more Albanian minority encouraged their ences Po university, links to a “particular than 1.5m, but I cannot prove it.” supporters to list lots of family members lack of trust in French society” towards in- who lived abroad. When officials realised stitutions, employers and government. Countless calculations—income per that the totals would be fantastical, the During confinement “distrust” was the sin- head, number of bathtubs per head— process was aborted. gle most-cited feeling by the French in a depend on knowing how many heads poll for Sciences Po, while for Germans and there are. If Mr Simovski is right and A new census was planned for April Brits it was “calm”. This, says Mr Algan, “is there are 27.5% fewer people in North this year. However, when a snap election the key to understanding why the return to Macedonia than officially estimated, was called, the census was postponed. work will be slower and more complicated then gdp per head, among other things, And the election itself was then post- in France than in Germany”. In May, despite will be much higher. However, the true poned because of covid-19. As a result, déconfinement, François Villeroy de Gal- population may be between 1.6m and says Verica Janeska, an economist, the hau, the governor of the Bank of France, ex- government cannot make well-informed pects the economy to operate at only 83% economic decisions. capacity, after 73% in April. The balance between safety and pros- In 2019, for the first time in history, perity is perilous. As Eric Chaney of the In- more Macedonians died than were born. stitut Montaigne, a think-tank, points out, Births and deaths, at least, are accurately chômage partiel (which covers 12.4m work- counted. Harder to gauge are the num- ers) has been the right policy to avoid lay- bers who move abroad to work. Some offs, “but creates the wrong incentives 81,000 have Bulgarian passports. This about returning to work”. The government means they can work easily and legally in now talks about gradually shifting the cost the eu. It also means they don’t show up of the scheme to employers from June. as Macedonians on any foreign database. Having played so well to French angoisse to Unemployment used to be a big problem. impose confinement, the government may Now labour shortages are emerging as a find it peculiarly hard to secure the trust bigger one. This is a problem across the needed to assuage those fears, and get the Balkans, but in all Europe only North country fully back to work. 7 Macedonia and Ukraine, which last held a census in 2001, share the honour of not knowing even roughly how many people they have.

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws 42 Europe The Economist May 16th 2020 2 restaurant turnover fell by 70% in the in polls that the government is handling years. The fleet’s submarine activity is at its month through April 22nd. Elisabeth Pe- the epidemic well. highest level since the cold war, and the ters, who is 67 and lives on one of the is- Time will tell whether Sweden chose a country’s new boats are quiet and well- lands off the west coast of Sweden, believes better strategy than other countries, says armed. As a result, the alliance’s “acoustic there has been a “huge change” in people’s Jussi Sane of the Finnish Institute for edge”—its ability to detect subs at longer behaviour, aligned with official advice. Health and Welfare, because the costs of ranges than Russia can—“has narrowed Some people are not seeing their grand- lockdowns—in terms not only of economic dramatically”, reckons the International children at all now, she says. When her damage but also harm to people’s mental Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank. children and grandchildren visit everyone health—are yet to be tallied. European The main task of Russian subs is defen- stays outside all day and keeps at a distance countries will see more covid-19 deaths sive: to protect a “bastion”, the area in the from her and her husband. when people start moving about, because Barents Sea and Sea of Okhotsk where its On first glance, Sweden seems to have the share of those infected so far (and thus own nuclear-armed ballistic-missile sub- paid a heavy price for choosing less strin- presumably immune, at least for some marines patrol. But nato admirals worry gent measures to keep people apart. By May time) is still in the single digits. Mr Gie- that, in a conflict, some might pose a wider 13th it had recorded 33 covid-19 deaths per secke reckons that Stockholm will reach threat to the alliance. A separate Russian 100,000 people, a rate more than three “herd immunity”, the 40-60% rate of infec- naval force known as the Main Directorate times that of Denmark and seven times tion needed to halt the spread of the of Deep-Sea Research (gugi, in its Russian higher than in Finland, which had shut coronavirus, by June. He thinks that when acronym) could also target the thicket of schools and restaurants in March. Even so, European countries count deaths a year undersea cables that cross the Atlantic. Sweden’s mortality rate has been much from now their figures will be similar, re- The challenge is a familiar one. For lower than that in Britain, France and gardless of the measures taken and the much of the cold war, nato allies sought to Spain. Swedes largely approve of their numbers now. The economic damage in bottle up the Soviet fleet in the Arctic by es- country’s approach, with two-thirds saying Sweden, however, may be smaller. 7 tablishing a picket across the so-called giuk gap, a transit route between Green- land, Iceland and Britain that was strung Naval strategy with underwater listening posts. The gap is Northern fights now back in fashion and nato is reinvest- ing in anti-submarine capabilities after de- cades of neglect. But defence in depth may not suffice. A new generation of Russian ship-based mis- siles, capable of striking nato ships or ter- ritory from far north of the giuk gap, repre- America and Britain mount a show of force in the Arctic sents “a dramatically new and challenging threat”, concludes the iiss. Similar con- The barents sea is not a hospitable French carrier. Another was to assert free- cerns led the Reagan administration to place for visitors. “Frequent snow dom of navigation in the face of Russia’s adopt a more offensive naval posture, storms…blotted out the land for hours on imposition of rules on the Northern Sea sending forces into the Soviet Union’s mar- end,” wrote an unlucky British submariner Route (nsr), a passage between the Barents itime bastion—“bearding the bear in its sent there to snoop around during the cold Sea and the Pacific Ocean that is increas- lair”, as a British mp once put it. “I’m struck war. “We faced the beastliness of spray ingly navigable as ice melts. Although last by similarities with the 1980s,” says Niklas which turned to ice even before it struck week’s exercise did not enter the nsr, it Granholm of the Swedish Defence Re- our faces.” American and British warships hints at a willingness to do so in the future. search Agency. “A forward maritime strat- have not exercised there since the 1980s— More broadly, the Arctic is a growing egy to get up close and personal with the until they returned last week. factor in nato defence plans. Russia has Russian Northern Fleet, rather than meet On May 1st a flotilla of two American de- beefed up its Northern Fleet in recent them farther south.” 7 stroyers, a nuclear submarine, a support ship and a long-range maritime-patrol air- CANADA 750 km craft, plus a British frigate, practised their sub-hunting skills in the Norwegian Sea. NATO members A rctic Circle That is not out of the ordinary; nato has ATLANTIC been rediscovering its cold-war interest in OCEAN Greenland Alaska the Arctic in recent years. In 2018, for in- DENMARK UNITED stance, an American aircraft-carrier sallied Greenland- STATES into the Arctic Circle for the first time in 30 Iceland-UK ICELAND (GIUK) gap years, during a huge exercise in Norway. Norwegian Bering Strait But on May 4th some of those ships BRITAIN Sea Svalbard North Pole North-east broke off and sailed farther north into the passage Barents Sea, along with a third destroyer, North Sea North-east NORWAY ARCTIC OCEAN remaining there until ve Day on May 8th. NORWAY passage PACIFIC Russia’s navy, whose powerful Northern OCEAN Fleet is based at Severomorsk around the corner, was told in advance, but still greet- DENMARK Barents Northern Sea sea route ed its visitors with live torpedo exercises. The decision to dispatch destroyers was Kaliningrad RUSSIA Sea of Okhotsk a bold one. One aim was to show that co- (Baltic Fleet HQ) vid-19 has not blunted swords, despite the virus knocking out an American and a Severomorsk (Northern Fleet HQ)

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Economist May 16th 2020 Europe 43 Charlemagne Real life and postcard views Kraftwerk built modern Europe. The rest of us just live in it wealthy, clean-cut straights from Germany’s far west. Indeed, it was precisely those foreign assumptions about what Who speaks for Europe? Henry Kissinger’s question has never found a satisfactory answer, but a literalist might turn to the rock music should be that Kraftwerk sought to shake off when they press room of the Berlaymont building in Brussels. Here, day after emerged from Düsseldorf’s small avant-garde in 1970. Simply to day, well-groomed spokespeople for the European Commission adopt a German name, to sing in German and to devote an album to calmly field questions from a potpourri of journalists in antiseptic the national leisure pursuit of driving effortlessly on the autobahn surroundings, slipping smoothly from one language to another as marked the group out as eccentric, perhaps dangerously so in a they address the finer points of telecoms regulation, border irreg- country still grappling with the horrors of its recent history. ularities or fisheries law. (At least they did, before covid-19 struck.) As Kraftwerk shed their hirsute Krautrock roots for precision- It is hard for such a bloodless organisation to find appropriate engineered synthesised music, predictable jibes followed. “The fi- cultural expression. The eu’s anthem, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”, nal solution to the music problem?” scoffed the New Musical Ex- satisfies its leaders’ self-regard but is an ill fit for a club with little press, tastelessly, in 1975. But their European reference points— hold on public affection. Better, surely, to turn to Kraftwerk, the Russian constructivism, the Belle Époque, Bauhaus’s fusion of art German electronic group, the death of whose co-founder, Florian and technology—pre-dated Nazism. Indeed, this “retro-futurism” Schneider, was announced last week. Kraftwerk’s albums from the was the answer to Kraftwerk’s problematic heritage, notes Uwe mid-1970s to early1980s may have reinvented pop, spawning half a Schütte, author of a book on the band. Rather than seek liberation dozen genres and helping define the digital age. But they were also via Anglo-American individualism, they would raid Europe’s past perfectly in tune with the construction of contemporary Europe. for points of reference that could help assemble a better future. Kraftwerk were too dedicated to the craft of sound to incorpo- To hear Kraftwerk cycle through their universal, collective rate into their music anything so banal as a vision. But parts of themes—man’s relationship with technology, broadcast commu- “Trans-Europe Express” (1977) project a certain idea of Europe. “Eu- nications, mobility—often in several languages, is thus to hear rope Endless” sets a vaguely decadent description of a borderless pop music re-engineered for an entirely fresh set of concerns. continent (“Parks, hotels and palaces…”) to a stately, arpeggiated Owen Hatherley, an author, calls it “a kind of electronic Esperanto”. synth-line. Eight years later the Schengen agreement made this re- This is the soundtrack of the eu, anonymous elites knitting to- ality. The album’s title track chronicles a continental rail journey gether a continent, unafraid of complexity, grounded in a quiet op- atop a rhythm emulating the sound of wheel on track. These were timism. Like officials fine-tuning directives in airless Brussels of- themes then almost untouched by contemporary rock music. fices, Kraftwerk shunned publicity, instead indulging their sonic perfectionism from inside their secretive Kling Klang studio in To be sure, theirs was a decidedly “old Europe”, centred on the Düsseldorf. Only once, by remixing their 1975 hit “Radio-Activity” Rhineland, where Schneider and Ralf Hütter, his co-founder, had to reflect their conversion to the anti-nuclear cause, did they take grown up, with the Netherlands and Belgium just across the border anything that might be called a stand. Otherwise they preferred il- and France not much farther away. The romantic sojourn sketched lumination to fulmination. Many bands seek to change the world. in “Trans-Europe Express” starts on the Champs-Élysées and For Kraftwerk, the point was to describe it. makes it no farther east than the Café Hawelka in Vienna. Kraft- werk never played communist East Germany (though they did It’s more fun to curl fruit make it to Hungary and Poland in 1981). Nor could their music al- Which Kraftwerk tune should Brussels adopt? If “Europe Endless” ways hope to escape the gaze of the Stasi, says Olaf Zimmermann, might sit unhappily with countries that have fallen victim to Euro- who ran an electronic-music radio show in the gdr. The rebel yells peans’ occasionally expansive sense of borders, what about “The of Bruce Springsteen or Mick Jagger anyway held more appeal to Telephone Call” (1986), repurposed to celebrate the eu’s success in those living under communism’s yoke than the stiff beats of four reducing roaming charges; “The Robots” (1978), to honour the ex- cellent performance of Eurocrats who “are programmed just to do anything you want us to”; or “Numbers” (1981), a recital of digits in more languages than even Frans Timmermans, the commission’s polyglot vice-president, can muster, set to a savage electro beat? Perhaps the moment has passed. Eventually, as the world Kraftwerk had divined overtook them, the music fizzled. Their dis- appointing last album, from 2003, was devoted to cycling. Europe, too, moved on: widening, deepening, now fracturing. Yet it is a pity Kraftwerk never found the chance to explore the themes that shaped the continent in this century: cheap air travel, just-in-time supply chains, mobile technology (“Pocket Calculator”, a hymn to the creative possibilities of hand-held devices, gets halfway there). Schneider left Kraftwerk in 2008. Since then the group, basical- ly Mr Hütter and three friends, has toured continuously, thrilling fans with spectacular visuals. On May 16th, before the virus struck, Kraftwerk were to join the festivities for Beethoven’s 250th birth- day in Bonn as they marked their own 50th anniversary. They were said to have been taken by the symbolism, as well they might: Eu- rope’s official bard and its unofficial man-machine troubadours, united in celebration of the continent that made them possible. 7

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws 44 Britain The Economist May 16th 2020 Britain’s international reputation confirmation of deeper-rooted problems: a political culture of hubris and exceptional- How others see us ism; atrophied public services; inequality and poor health. At home and abroad, Britain’s handling of covid-19 is drawing unfavourable comparisons At home, the crisis has become a politi- cal risk for Mr Johnson. His announcement Aslide tracking Britain’s coronavirus Netherlands, Spain and Sweden puts Brit- on May 10th of tentative steps to unwind death toll against other countries’ had ain at the top; data for America and Italy are the lockdown did not go well. Only a third been a fixture of the daily government not available. of voters said they understood what the press conference. When it was first pro- new “Stay alert, control the virus” slogan duced, on March 30th, it showed the Un- Britain is not alone in experiencing asked of them. Teachers’ unions criticised ited Kingdom trailing Spain, Italy, France shortages of protective equipment, a defi- plans to start to reopen schools on June 1st and America in a grisly league table. On cient testing regime and uncontrolled out- as unsafe. In London the Tube and some May 9th, the last time it was displayed, Brit- breaks of the virus in care homes. It is too buses were busy, despite Mr Johnson’s plea ain was the highest in Europe. It has now soon to say how far the death toll is attrib- for returning workers to avoid public tran- disappeared from the briefings. utable to government missteps, demogra- sport. Mr Johnson’s poll ratings remain phy or geography. Yet to many foreign ob- high, but have fallen back in recent weeks, As The Economist went to press, the con- servers, Britain’s death toll serves as and a poll by YouGov on May 12th showed firmed British death toll stood at 33,186, the Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour Party’s new second highest reported figure in the world Also in this section leader, more popular than him. behind America (see chart overleaf). Brit- 45 Toothache in a pandemic ain is fourth for fatalities as a share of pop- 46 Migrant care workers Voters still approve of the government’s ulation. On May 13th, Boris Johnson told 46 Propping up the economy handling of the crisis, by a net 12 points ac- the House of Commons that although the — Bagehot is away cording to a survey released on May 9th by death count was “deeply, deeply horrify- Opinium, a pollster. But the figure is down ing”, it would be premature to make inter- Read more from this week’s Britain section: from 21 points two weeks earlier, and re- national comparisons until the figures of Economist.com/Britain spondents increasingly think foreign gov- excess deaths were released, which would ernments have handled things better. In a capture cases where covid-19 was not re- poll published on April 25th they judged corded as a cause of death. The Economist’s Britain’s government to have performed calculations of excess deaths per 100,000 worse than those of China, Germany, people in Britain, Belgium, France, the France, South Korea, Japan and Australia. By May 5th, Italy and Spain had joined that list. Only America gets lower marks of ten countries polled. Voters who supported Brexit tend to take a rosier view of Britain’s1

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Economist May 16th 2020 Britain 45 2 performance than Remainers, but both are chael Jay, a former head of the foreign of- tober on May 12th, compares favourably becoming increasingly negative. fice, but securing top international posts with schemes deployed elsewhere. Oxford Attitudes at home are reflected abroad. may be tricky for a while. University’s vaccine research programme Chinese parents panicked on social media is one of the world’s most advanced; suc- about children studying in a plague-ridden Declinism is a national pastime in Brit- cess there, or in one of a series of British basket-case. But the Europeans are most ain, and some aspects of the country’s re- trials for antiviral therapies, would be a fil- vociferous. Coronavirus has reinforced un- sponse have been impressive. The National lip for a battered government. favourable views formed during the Brexit Health Service has held up remarkably saga. The British government’s early dis- well, thanks to swift reorganisation. Mr But the recent knocks to Britain’s repu- missal of lockdowns was seen as reminis- Johnson is driving an international effort tation will have consequences. “I would cent of Mr Johnson’s disregard for the risks to produce a vaccine, and has pledged gen- not want to be going around, as we all used of leaving the bloc. The German press has erous sums in support of it. Britain’s vast to do, saying whatever its defects the Brit- been particularly scathing. Süddeutsche jobs rescue package, announced by Rishi ish government system is one of the best in Zeitung concluded that unequal and un- Sunak, the chancellor, originally an- the world and other countries should bor- healthy Britain made “a good breeding nounced in March and extended until Oc- row it,” says Lord Jay. 7 ground for the pandemic”. Poland’s gov- ernment, which locked down early, cited Toothache in a pandemic Britain as a case study of what not to do. Scott Morrison, the Australian prime min- Say cheese! ister, described the “herd immunity” strat- egy that Britain had initially favoured as a The alarming return of prehistoric dentistry “death sentence”. Mr Johnson’s election victory last year “I’ve been using the wax from a Baby- One of the lucky ones went some way towards restoring an image bel,” admits a sufferer of chronic of stability and competence after Theresa toothache; she has stuffed cheese-casing rather than nhs contracts, and are thus May’s chaotic attempt to negotiate Britain’s into a cavity to replace a lost filling. With facing financial collapse. Some, unlike departure from the eu. Covid-19 risks de- most surgeries in Britain out of action shops or restaurants, do not qualify for railing that, and foreign policy hands wor- due to lockdown, home dentistry has business-rates relief. “I can’t help feeling ry about its impact on Britain’s reputation become worryingly common. “People are forgotten when I walk down the street for good governance. Expertise in public using needles to burst abscesses,” says and see the vape shop, which is getting a administration and fields such as global James Goolnik, a dentist in London. £25,000 grant and rates relief, painting health has long been one of Britain’s calling “They’re using knives and forks to take and decorating,” sighs the hygienist. cards in international forums. New Zea- teeth out, and nail files to cut down land’s standing has been enhanced by its broken teeth.” When dentists reopen, they will rapid elimination of the outbreak. Mr John- struggle to satisfy the pent-up demand son’s decision to shun an eu scheme to Britain has long had a reputation for they are bound to face. Safe dentistry in a procure medical kit collectively sent a bad teeth, perhaps dating back to the pandemic is slow. Waiting areas must be blunt message about its appetite for co-op- second world war, when American sol- kept empty, protective kit procured and eration after Brexit, according to Fabian diers were horrified by rows of bare surgeries disinfected. At practices that Zuleeg, of the European Policy Centre, a gums. Today it is unfair: Americans are are now doing urgent care, such re- think-tank in Brussels. more likely than Britons to be missing strictions mean traffic is down by three- Reputation is soft power, and big teeth. But the nation’s teeth are not going quarters. If there is a similar drop-off in cheeses in the foreign-policy world worry to improve in the near future. service when others return, care will about the impact on Britain’s ability to continue to be rationed. Bad news for sway opinion. “During the Brexit process I Since March 25th, all routine treat- anyone with toothache. Good news for was very struck by the decline in Britain’s ment has been cancelled. Dentists offer Babybel manufacturers. authority,” says a former foreign secretary, just the “three as”—antibiotics, analge- noting particular dismay in Japan. “We we- sics and advice. Someone with lost ren’t treated as grown-ups.” Esteem for crown will be dealt with over the phone. Britain is probably recoverable, says Mi- MyDentist, with around 650 practices in Britain, has warned its patients: “do not A race you don’t want to win use superglue or fixadent to fit your crown.” A hygienist reports that a patient Covid-19, confirmed deaths had become suicidal with pain. To 6am GMT May 14th 2020, log scale Only those with problems such as Britain 100,000 breathing difficulties due to swelling or nerve exposure qualify for urgent treat- United States Italy ment. The British Dental Association Spain (bda), a trade union, says the new urgent Germany France 10,000 care system has faced teething problems, 1,000 with a lack of the protective kit needed for “aerosol-generating procedures” (ie, 100 ones where spit or blood will be flying around). As a result, in some practices 10 the only treatment on offer is teeth re- moval. “In this day and age that’s pretty 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 72 prehistoric,” says Dr Goolnik. Days since 50th death Many dental practices either rely Source: Johns Hopkins University CSSE entirely or partly on private income,

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws 46 Britain The Economist May 16th 2020 Immigration such migrants would have been excluded. Costly treatment In one sense, the pandemic takes the Who cares? Britain, cost to government of covid-19-related pressure off. A deep recession should limit policies, 2020-21, £bn the need to import low-paid workers, since there will be a large pool of unemployed 0 100 200 300 400 domestic labour. Yet farms are flying in New immigration rules would exclude workers from Romania, suggesting that Public-service spending the key workers Britain relies on Britons on their uppers might hesitate be- Job-retention scheme fore taking back-breaking or low-paid jobs. (first iteration) “Care work isn’t just bum wiping,” in- sists Karolina Gerlich. In the 12 years The political argument for a restrictive Self-employed scheme since she swapped her native Poland for regime is weakening. Voters were warming Britain, aged 18, she has learnt that it in- to immigration even before they voted to Business support volves being a “pa, a nurse, a therapist, an leave the eu and thereby restrict it (see occupational therapist, a dietician and a chart). The scandal in 2018 over the govern- Welfare friend”. She now runs a charity supporting ment’s shoddy treatment of the Windrush Job-retention scheme other carers, while working as one herself. generation of Caribbean migrants illustrat- (second iteration) Yet under post-Brexit immigration rules ed that, if the public senses injustice, crack- due to take effect in January, a similar ap- downs can prove as politically perilous as Estimated tax loss plicant would be turned down for a visa, liberal approaches. A survey in March by since the job is classed as low-skilled. “I Ipsos mori, a pollster, found that the over- Sources: OBR; The Economist feel disrespected, offended and like my whelming majority of voters want the contribution to the economy and to the number of migrants coming to Britain to insiders. More than one in five workers is country has not been recognised at all.” work in care homes to stay the same or rise. now on it. Since the pandemic and its associated re- The timing of the covid-19 pandemic cession will significantly reduce overall The mounting costs of providing this puts Priti Patel, the hardline home secre- immigration anyway, Ms Patel can afford to support in part explain the government’s tary, in an awkward spot. Recognising that be a little more generous. 7 shifting rhetoric over lockdown measures. Britain’s vote to leave the eu in 2016 was in Britons in many sectors have been told to part down to a desire to curb immigration, The economy return to their office, factory or site if tele- she plans to end freedom of movement working is not possible (although some from the bloc and apply the same salary Acute to chronic such employees were never told by the gov- threshold (£25,600, or $31,200, for most) ernment to stop work). Some parliamen- and skills requirement to prospective mi- The economic costs of the pandemic tarians have been pushing Rishi Sunak, the grants wherever they come from. Yet many are becoming clear chancellor, to wind down the job-protec- of the incomers such a policy would rule tion scheme. Fearful of mass unemploy- out—including care-home workers—are The last time Britain’s gdp fell by 2% ment, however, on May 12th Mr Sunak ex- those classified by the government as the quarter-on-quarter, the investment tended it to the end of October—though he pandemic’s “key workers”. bank Lehman Brothers had just gone bust, has sensibly tweaked it to allow bosses to bringing the global financial system to its bring back workers part-time from August. A paper by researchers at Oxford Uni- knees. Then, in 2008, Britain was at the be- He also says that employers will soon have versity, published on May 14th, finds that ginning of a steady rise in unemployment to foot more of the bill. nearly one in five of those working in es- that would continue for years, and real sential care-related occupations are immi- wages had started a decline that would take The extension of the scheme adds fur- grants. In all, a little more than half of eu more than a decade to undo. So it is alarm- ther costs to an already swollen fiscal bill migrants now classed as key workers ing that, on May 13th, statisticians reported (see chart). Even in the absence of any de- would not have qualified for a work visa a similar fall in gdp in January to March cline in output, and with no fall in tax rev- under the new dispensation. Using a dif- 2020. The country was in lockdown for enues, this support would push up Brit- ferent definition of key worker (the catego- only a week of that period. The second- ain’s budget deficit from 2% of gdp, before ry is blurry), the Institute for Public Policy quarter figures, released in August, will the pandemic, to 8%—its highest level Research, a think-tank, finds that 71% of make for astonishingly grim reading. since the global financial crisis of 2007-09. In reality, nominal gdp may fall by 12% or On the move With many companies shut down, more this year, and tax revenues are col- whether temporarily or permanently, lapsing. An annual deficit on a wartime “Has migration had a positive or negative impact Britons are flocking to the government for scale looks inevitable, leading to substan- on Britain?”, % replying support. Universal credit, the primary wel- tially higher public debt. fare programme before the pandemic, has Brexit Home Secretary 60 been swamped with applications, al- A leaked government memo published 50 though it seems to be coping better than on May 13th in the Daily Telegraph suggest- referendum quits over Windrush welfare systems in some other countries ed that the deficit could hit around 15% of (see United States section). The govern- pre-pandemic gdp. Measures under con- Positive ment’s scheme for preserving jobs during sideration for balancing the books includ- the pandemic, under which the state pays ed raising income tax and freezing pen- 40 up to 80% of a furloughed employee’s sions spending. A brouhaha followed. In wages, has seen many more applications truth the Treasury has been looking for 30 than was expected, according to Treasury some time at how to raise revenue to pay Negative the costs of an ageing population, regard- less of the pandemic. For now, with gov- 20 ernment-borrowing costs near record lows Mr Sunak seems more focused on support- 2015 16 17 18 19 20 ing the economy than on balancing the budget. But the memo is a sobering re- Source: Ipsos MORI minder: though the threat to public health should eventually pass, the economic costs of the pandemic will linger. 7

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws International The Economist May 16th 2020 47 Crime and covid-19 ganised criminals to put old skills to new use. The global economic depression that Covid nostra looks likely to follow will offer them a chance to extend their reach deep into the JOHANNESBURG, ROME AND SÃO PAULO legitimate economy. “The potential for problems arising from this is without pre- The pandemic is providing organised crooks with fresh opportunities cedent,” frets another international law- enforcement official. Karachi is among Asia’s most crime- cially when lawbreaking, along with much ridden cities. And yet in eight days in else, has gone indoors. The Italian figures New scams are already proliferating, March, after covid-19 forced it into lock- showed a drop of 44% in domestic vio- some ingeniously simple. On March 16th down, not a single car was reported stolen. lence. Police reckon that is because many the South African Reserve Bank issued a El Salvador, which has one of the world’s victims dare not call to report assaults statement denying that it had sent collec- highest murder rates, enjoyed four homi- while their assailants are within earshot. tors house-to-house to recover banknotes cide-free days in the same month. Many in case they had been contaminated with countries have reported tumbling crime Meanwhile Gun Violence Archive, an covid-19. Sales of counterfeit, often sub- rates, as crooks, along with everyone else, ngo based in Washington, dc, counted standard, drugs have surged. In March Op- have shut themselves away. Italy was the more than 2,000 deaths by shooting in eration Pangaea, co-ordinated by Interpol first European country to lock down, on America between March 1st and April and involving police forces in 90 countries, March 9th. Even before then, many people 19th—a 6% increase over the average in the led to more than 100 arrests worldwide and were working from home. The number of same period during the past three years. the seizure of potentially dangerous phar- crimes reported in Italy between March 1st That echoes what happened in the 1918-19 maceuticals worth more than $14m. Brazil- and March 22nd dropped by 64% compared flu pandemic. According to Barry Latzer, an ian drugs gangs short of cash are robbing with the same period in 2019. emeritus professor at the John Jay College more banks. of Criminal Justice in New York, murders “I would not be surprised if crime statis- in 1918 increased in each of the five worst- Meanwhile the urgent need for personal tics, which are dominated by less serious affected states. Sheltering in place short- protective equipment (ppe) has opened up crimes like theft and various kinds of street ens tempers. It also makes it easier for a new field for ineffective, overpriced or crime, were to go down, at least temporar- gangsters to locate enemies and rivals. even non-existent goods. Two factors have ily,” says Jürgen Stock, secretary-general of helped the criminals: the waiving of nor- Interpol, the world policing body. But gov- Most worrying, says Mr Stock, is the po- mal procurement controls by governments ernment figures reflect only reported tential for covid-19 to create the ideal con- desperate to protect their health workers; crime—and not all crime is reported, espe- ditions for the spread of serious, organised and the impossibility of arranging face-to- crime. The pandemic is encouraging or- face meetings between customers and sup- pliers. In the most elaborate scam so far, a group of fraudsters succeeded in getting1

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws 48 International The Economist May 16th 2020 2 the authorities in Germany’s most popu- partially. “For many cartels and syndicates flects the difficulties of retail distribution, lous region, North Rhine-Westphalia, to it’s not a big problem”, he explains, “be- the link in the supply chain that has prob- part with €2.4m ($2.6m). The money was a cause of the money that is available at that ably had to be adjusted most. In Naples last down-payment for 10m masks. More than level. They have immense liquidity.” month police dogs found 89 packages 50 vehicles were lined up to import the fic- stuffed with narcotics waiting to be dis- titious masks from the Netherlands before The opium harvest in Afghanistan that patched from a courier depot. The drugs the ruse was discovered. It involved a web- supplies nearly all the world’s heroin has had been ordered on the darknet. The cou- site registered in Spain, an intermediary in been largely unaffected. Coca farmers in rier firm had no idea of its role. Ireland and a firm in the Netherlands with Colombia, the world’s largest cultivator, a website that turned out to have been have just had their best year on record, Shortly afterwards Interpol told its 194 cloned by the scammers. With the help of though in Peru a shortage of imported members that drug-dealers were also using financial institutions in three countries, chemical precursors has made it harder to the cover of food deliveries to sell their investigators managed to block the pay- produce cocaine. The closure of pharma- wares. In Ireland police found 8kg of co- ments, including €500,000 on its way to ceutical plants in China threatened the caine and two handguns hidden in pizza Nigeria. supply of precursors used in the produc- boxes. In the Cape Flats, a sprawl of town- tion of methamphetamines, but the inter- ships on the outskirts of Cape Town, gangs Making out like (masked) bandits ruption was temporary. are delivering drugs along with food par- That attempted sting reflects an explosion cels. Heroin prices there rose initially be- in cybercrime since the lockdowns began. The next stage in the supply chain— cause of a mix of profiteering and new de- On the night of March 12th the Czech Re- wholesale distribution—has been distort- livery fees (they have now returned to public’s second-largest hospital, the Uni- ed. But gangs are already adapting. Syndi- normal). In Lesotho getting heroin direct to versity Hospital in Brno, was hit by a ran- cates that rely on drugs smuggled on your door costs 200-500 rand ($11-27), on somware attack (in which the target is flights, such as Nigerian gangs in South Af- top of the usual 1,200 rand per gram. prevented from accessing files until a pay- rica, have been hit hard. Two members of ment is made). Urgent surgical operations Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel told Reuters that far The Cape Town gangs are among several had to be postponed and patients redirect- fewer drugs are being transported in cars around the world that are making a big ed to other hospitals. Several other medical across the border into the United States show of charity during the pandemic. Mob- facilities have experienced similar attacks since it was shut on March 21st. Syndicates sters have been reported delivering food to since the start of the covid-19 emergency, seem to be using tunnels and drones in- the needy in Mexico and Italy. In El Salva- according to Interpol. stead. Officials in Brazil have reported that dor and Brazil they have enforced curfews. traffickers in cocaine, which enters from In Japan yakuza have offered to disinfect a But more traditional organised crimi- Colombia and Peru on its way to Europe quarantined cruise liner. nal activities have been hampered by the and Africa, are switching consignments lockdowns. Protection rackets, prostitu- from land routes and onto boats travelling But even where such initiatives are not tion rings, illegal gambling and the drugs down the Amazon. With maritime and air used as a cover for drug peddling, their ef- trade all depend on people being able to traffic greatly diminished, it is even harder fects are anything but benign. They en- move around freely. So do imprisoned to get drugs out of Brazil. Yet seizures be- hance gangsters’ popularity and image as bosses of organised crime groups if they tween February and April were up by 10%. latter-day Robin Hoods. They guarantee fu- are to continue to control their businesses. Elvis Secco of the Brazilian Federal Police’s ture votes for the politicians whom mob- This is a particular challenge for the Brazil- drugs and organised crime unit says traf- sters sponsor. And they realise one of the ian drugs gangs, many of whose leaders are fickers are offloading their stockpiles and fundamental aims of a true mafia: delegiti- jailed. Lincoln Gakiya, a prosecutor for the taking more risks, which partly explains mising the state by displacing official au- state of São Paulo, says visiting family why more narcotics are being impounded. thority. A gang that enforces a lockdown is members often convey notes and informa- doing the job of the police; one that distrib- tion. Now incarcerated bosses have to rely Cocaine prices in Europe and America utes food to the destitute, that of govern- on infrequent appearances by their lawyers have risen accordingly. But that also re- ment welfare bodies. to communicate with their subordinates. A deep or prolonged depression will Extortion provides many criminal open up rich opportunities for crooks in at groups with a regular flow of cash. It is es- least three areas. High unemployment will pecially important to the street gangs, or make it easier for mobsters to recruit peo- maras, of Central America. But collecting ple. Government recovery schemes will cash during a pandemic is tricky. Data give them a chance to muscle in on juicy quoted by the Global Initiative against public contracts. And lower corporate pro- Transnational Organised Crime comparing fits will make it easier for mafias to take March 2020 with the same month last year over businesses that can then be used to showed 9% and 17% falls in extortion inci- launder illicit gains. dents registered by police in Guatemala and El Salvador (though most are not re- In Italy, after the financial crisis, some ported). In Honduras the decline was 80%. firms accepted loans at below-market rates According to the fnamp, an anti-gang unit in return for taking onto the books—or the in the country, Honduran gang leaders board—a mafioso who then began to give have warned transport firms that once the the orders. According to the chief of the quarantine ends, protection money will Italian police, Franco Gabrielli, his officers have to be paid retrospectively. in the regions worst hit by covid-19 have al- ready come across men carrying cash- The biggest money-spinner for most or- stuffed briefcases that may be part of the ganised crooks is the drugs trade. Mr Stock Italian mafias’ version of “helicopter mon- says early reports suggest the global busi- ey”. The risk is that politicians already ness, estimated at around $500bn, has struggling to cope with the effects of the been disrupted—but only temporarily and pandemic will shove its implications for the underworld to the back of their minds and the bottom of their agendas. 7

UPLOADED BY \"What's News\" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws The Economist May 16th 2020 49 Climate brief Impacts From seconds to centuries mate change. But research suggests that many of them will. Most of the problems Bad times people have with weather and climate come from extremes. When means shift a The damage done by climate change will be severe, widespread little, extremes can shift a lot (see chart and sometimes surprising overleaf). Today’s rare extremes become to- morrow’s regular disturbances; tomor- On november 21st 2016, a line of thun- of 2016 had not brought weather particular- row’s extremes are completely new. derstorms passed through the Austra- ly well suited to the growth of allergenic lian state of Victoria. By the end of the fol- grasses, would that stormy afternoon have How damaging these impacts will be to lowing day, it had sent 3,000 people to been so catastrophic? Such complexities the economic and physical welfare of hu- hospital. Storms typically hurt people by mean that a gradual change to the climate mankind depends on how much warming blowing down buildings, flooding streets can lead to sudden changes in the impacts takes place and how well people adapt— or setting fires. In this case, though, the ca- on human beings when things pass a cer- both of which are currently unknowable. sualties were caused by asthma. Late that tain threshold. And that threshold will not But it is possible to get a qualitative sense afternoon a peculiarly powerful downdraft necessarily be discernible in advance. of what they could mean by looking at the generated by the storm front pushed a layer range of timescales over which they oper- of cold air thick with pollen, dust and other Not all the ways in which today’s weath- ate. At one end, a thunderstorm’s pollen particles through Melbourne. The city’s er harms people will be exacerbated by cli- surge, sweeping by in minutes; at the other, ambulance service was swamped within sea-level rise which could last longer than hours. At least ten people died. In this series any civilisation in human history. The risks that weather and climate pose 1 The politics of climate action In terms of short-lived events, the worst to human life are not always as specific to sort of bad day that the world’s weather can the peculiar circumstances of time and 2 Modelling the greenhouse effect offer is generally taken to be the one on place as that sudden-onset asthma epi- which you get hit by a tropical cyclone, demic. But they are complex functions of 3 The carbon cycle, present and future which is why hurricanes (as they are what, where and who, and their mecha- known in the Atlantic) and typhoons (as nisms are not always easily discerned. 4 The impacts and their timescales they are known in some other places) have What is more, they can interact with each become so heated a part of the arguments other. For example, if the southern spring 5 Engineering an energy transition about climate change. A single hurricane can do more than $100bn in damage, as 6 The imperative of adaptation Harvey did when it hit Houston in August 2017, or kill thousands, as Maria did the fol- lowing month in Puerto Rico. Tropical cyclones can only form over a sea or ocean with a surface temperature of 27°C or more. The area where such tem- peratures are possible will definitely in- crease with warming. But that does not mean hurricanes will become more com- mon. Their formation also requires that the wind be blowing at a similar speed close to the surface and at greater alti- tudes—and this condition, models say, will become less common in future over many of the places where hurricanes spawn. Thus models do not predict a great increase in the number of tropical cyclones; Atlan- tic hurricanes may well become more rare. But more heat in the oceans means that those tropical cyclones which do get going are more likely to become intense. There is thus broad agreement among experts that the proportion of hurricanes which reach category four or five looks set to increase. So, too, does the rainfall associated with them, because warmer air holds more moisture. Studies of the flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey suggest that warming due to climate change increased its rainfall by about 15%. Extreme rainfall events of many sorts increase in warmer worlds. The heat which powers hurricanes at sea can, on land, kill directly. Humans cool themselves by sweating, a process that be- comes less effective the more humid the at- mosphere. Combining the heat and the hu- midity into something called the wet-bulb1