2021 got off to a menacing start with dangerous new variants of the coronavirus having contributed to an ever-rising covid-19 death toll and complicating the long-awaited economic reopening and recovery in many countries—including those that were the first to roll out vaccines. Political, social, and economic conditions elsewhere have reinforced a widespread sense of systemic uncertainty. The COP26 conference left plenty of doubt about the world’s ability to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, and the erosion of democracy remains a paramount concern. In 2021, governments around the world united behind the exhortation to ‘build back better’ from the covid-19 crisis. But sloganeering will offer little respite for a world that has only just begun to reckon with the systemic challenges posed by rising debt levels, cyber warfare, new technologies, and other distinctly twenty-first-century challenges. Mint’s annual year-end issue, in collaboration with Project Syndicate, looks at what’s in store in 2022, with original, exclusive and incisive analyses from current and former political leaders, senior policymakers, and renowned scholars.
The waiting game in the year of results
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We are waiting for a result—again. One of our loved ones, a little boy, may have caught it at school. We’ll have the results by tonight, supposedly, but who knows? Perhaps they’re up already? Why is the screen so slow to refresh? Could the delay mean something? Is it possible that they are giving us a moment to catch our breath before hitting us with the news? Nothing yet. Wait, how come the screen got refreshed? Click here to read
US’ killer capitalism
A great failure of contemporary American capitalism is that it is not serving everyone. The educated minority—the one-third of the adult population with a four-year college degree—has prospered, but the majority has lost out, not just relatively but absolutely. The facts are increasingly clear and hard to ignore. Less-educated Americans’ prospects are getting worse: they are losing materially, they are enduring more pain and social isolation, and their lives are getting shorter. Click here to read
Brazil’s besieged democracy on the ropes
A mere 36 years after its exit from dictatorship, Brazil is teetering at the brink of an authoritarian abyss. The year ahead will show whether the country’s still-young democratic institutions can withstand an all-out assault from a populist president who seems determined to remain in power by any means. Click here to read
To democracy and back in South-East Asia
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For several decades, “people-powered" grassroots movements across South-East Asia have fought for democratic reforms, human rights, improved access to quality education and healthcare, and, ultimately, an end to extreme poverty. These movements have been motivated by a vision of inclusive prosperity and social justice that stands as an alternative to the neoliberal “road to serfdom" on which much of the region has been travelling by default. Click here to read
Reopening the world and ourselves post pandemic
We are almost two years into an unwanted experiment in what happens when national borders clang shut in a globally interdependent world. Cargo sits unclaimed at ports while container ships float offshore for weeks. Migrant workers are stranded. Rich countries hoard vaccines for future use when poorer ones need them immediately. What have we learned about nationalism and globalization that we can carry into a post-pandemic (if not post-covid) future? Click here to read
Recovering stronger together
As a born optimist, I consider 2021 to have been a year of recovery. The covid-19 pandemic is not yet over, but there is a ray of hope for a better tomorrow in both the health sector and the wider economy. Safe and effective vaccines have reduced covid-19 deaths, while governments’ fiscal interventions have helped to spur economic growth. But the global recovery remains uneven, owing to countries’ varying pre-pandemic economic conditions and divergent stimulus policies. Click here to read
China bets on finding common prosperity
The year 2021 marked the start of a new paradigm for the Chinese economy. China is shifting from a model championing GDP growth above all to one emphasizing efficiency, consumer welfare and protection, climate-change mitigation, and environmental protection. Chinese companies’ growth will be less unbridled and more regulated and monitored. The goal of building a global manufacturing powerhouse has evolved into the pursuit of techno-nationalism. China’s leaders believe their country is on the verge of a transformation into a truly “modern socialist economy". Click here to read
West Asia’s backwater blues
The year 2021 brought major developments across West Asia and North Africa, the effects of which will extend far into the future. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan was only the latest sign that the region is not only changing fast but also falling down the international community’s list of priorities.
Already, the region looks very different than the one the world has known in recent decades, owing to recent developments in the Arab-Israeli conflict (especially the signing of the Abraham Accords), Lebanon’s implosion and the crisis in Tunisia, among other issues. Much conventional wisdom about the region—and within it—no longer holds true. Click here to read
Advancing the trade cure for global crises like covid
The only thing that is certain about the future is uncertainty. And that is true of the future of trade as well. Despite repeated prior warnings of a possible global pandemic, covid-19 took the world by surprise. The impact on trade was swift and dramatic. In the second quarter of 2020, when much of the world was under lockdown, the volume of global merchandise trade plunged by 15% year on year—the type of sharp decline rarely seen outside of wartime. Click here to read
Post-peak China faces a bumpy road
Dictators do not like others grading their performance. Any sort of assessment of such leaders’ successes or failures, even by their close colleagues and advisers, is a big step towards undermining them. Permitting criticism, let alone encouraging it, is out of the question.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, the Communist Party of China’s most powerful boss since Mao Zedong, must feel particularly strongly about this. In 2022, Xi will seek the endorsement of the CPC’s 20th Congress for his plan to remain in power for a third term, thereby abolishing the two-term limit established by Deng Xiaoping and adhered to ever since. Click here to read
The legacy that Shinzo Abe left behind
It has been more than a year since Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, resigned due to illness. His successor, Yoshihide Suga, has come and gone. But institutional innovations that Abe spearheaded—namely, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad—look likely to shape Asia’s geopolitical landscape for a long time to come.
Abe worked tirelessly to deliver the CPTPP, after Donald Trump effectively torpedoed its predecessor pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, by withdrawing the US. The agreement that Abe revived currently includes 11 Asia-Pacific countries, with combined economic output of nearly $14 trillion. Click here to read
America’s struggle to cope with its domestic disarray
Almost a year after Joe Biden’s narrow election victory over Donald Trump, the US remains on a knife-edge. Many political outcomes are possible. These range from the gradual economic and political reform that Biden is seeking to the subversion of elections and constitutional rule that Trump attempted last January—and that he and the Republican Party are still intent on pursuing.
It’s not easy to diagnose exactly what ails America at its core so deeply that it incited the Trump movement. Is it the ceaseless culture wars that divide America by race, religion and ideology? Is it the increase in inequality of wealth and power to unprecedented levels? Is it America’s diminishing global power, with the rise of China and the repeated disasters of US-led wars of choice leading to national agony, frustration, and confusion? Click here to read
Preventing a US-China N-arms race
China’s recently reported tests of a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in July and August, though officially denied, are threatening to undermine strategic nuclear stability. They have already added to escalating tensions between the US and China.
Throughout the summer, satellite images revealed that China was in the process of building as many as 300 new missile silos in its northern deserts. Some of these silos are likely to be used merely as empty decoys. But if even half of them become sites for nuclear-armed missiles, it would represent a near-tripling of China’s nuclear arsenal. Click here to read
The alchemy of angst in the era of anger
Ours is the Age of Angst. It is an era of anger, apprehension, fear, confusion, division, polarization, and an increasing distrust in and disdain for institutions. Thanks to the proliferation of digital technologies, we are both spectators and gladiators. We can switch roles in the blink of an eye, whizzing back and forth between the audience seats and the dry, dusty arena.
Social media platforms have become the Colosseum of the twenty-first century. In these digital arenas—small and large, local and international—a new fight is staged almost every day, and though the contenders tend to change often, the language of loathing and mistrust remains constant. But whereas the ancient Romans were entertained by their brutal and bloody spectacles, we moderns are only made angrier by ours. Click here to read
Europe’s time to shine with Green Deal
Having done so much to elevate the global climate debate to the highest levels of diplomacy, the European Union and key member-state governments will soon be confronted with a fundamental paradox. The world’s prime-mover and norm-setter on climate change is heading into a year of bruising and protracted political struggle to realize its own climate ambitions.
On 14 July, to little fanfare, the European Commission unveiled one of the most important climate-policy responses since the signing of the Paris agreement in 2015. The Commission’s Fit for 55 plan offers a bold blueprint for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 55% by 2030, on the way to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. With a precise set of policy proposals adapted to different geographies, social systems, energy mixes and wealth levels, the plan is truly impressive, demonstrating clearly how the EU Green Deal will work in practice. Click here to read
Debt-for-climate swaps an effective means for relief
What if there was a magic bullet to address the climate crisis, the pandemic-induced debt crunch, and the need to boost development finance all at once?
It certainly is attractive to try to tackle these issues jointly, because we already need to mobilize climate finance from rich countries (the main polluters) to support low-income countries (who will bear a disproportionately large burden from climate change). European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said that “major economies do have a special duty to the least developed and most vulnerable countries", and International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said that “it makes sense" to seek to address debt pressures and the climate crisis jointly. The idea is to arrange “green debt swaps". Click here to read
There is no wiggle room ahead
The year 2021 felt like a roller coaster, as hopes rose and fell with pandemic statistics and shifting political winds. The new year looks much the same, except that there will be midterm elections in the US in November—the stakes of which could not be higher. Given all the uncertainty, it would be foolhardy to make predictions with any confidence. Still, I will offer my best bets.
For starters, covid-19 will finally be tamed, though not eradicated. Enough people will have been vaccinated in enough parts of the world as to allow most people in most places to overcome the fear that has gripped us for the past two years. But although this process will unleash a burst of “contained" energy, restarting the global economy will not be as straightforward as shutting much of it down was. Click here to read
Asia faces many regional security threats
In Asia today, the economy is global, politics are local, and security is local, regional and transnational. The Taliban’s rapid return to power in Afghanistan reminded Asians that our security is interlinked. Likewise, the covid-19 pandemic has raised the question of how to engineer an economic revival for the entire region.
That is not the end of the region’s challenges. Between the ongoing standoff on the India-China border, the tensions over Taiwan and the South China Sea, and the uncertain trajectory of Iran’s nuclear programme, it is clear that Asia is now the epicentre of security risks. Click here to read
Covid and the growth of digital capitalism
The outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic suddenly made every society fearful of face-to-face contact. Restaurants, cafés, concert halls, and other cultural amenities essential for a flourishing urban civilization were closed, in some countries for over a year, to protect people against the risk of infection and prevent health systems from being overwhelmed. Life retreated to the family cell, and the burden of stress and frustration grew.
During the lockdowns that many governments imposed, firms took steps to allow people to work online easily, purchase goods without having to enter a brick-and-mortar store, and entertain themselves without venturing outside. The big winners were companies like Amazon, Apple, and Netflix, whose market value has soared during the crisis. Click here to read
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