Health

The COVID-19 pandemic and the prospect of increasingly frequent and more intense natural and man-made disasters raise important questions about the resilience of the global economy to such shocks. The 2021 edition of the WTO's World Trade Report examines why the interconnected global trading system is both vulnerable and resilient to crises, how it can help countries to be more economically resilient to shocks, and what can be done to make the system better prepared and more resilient in the future.

Spurred by the splashy emergence of generative artificial intelligence and an array of other AI applications, experts participating in a new Pew Research Center canvassing have great expectations for digital advances across many aspects of life by 2035. They anticipate striking improvements in health care and education. They foresee a world in which wonder drugs are conceived and enabled in digital spaces; where personalized medical care gives patients precisely what they need when they need it; where people wear smart eyewear and earbuds that keep them connected to the people, things and information around them; where AI systems can nudge discourse into productive and fact-based conversations; and where progress will be made in environmental sustainability, climate action and pollution prevention

The World Health Organization's 1st foresight report, “Imagining the Future of Pandemics and Epidemics”, attempts to explore what the future of infectious threats might look like, using a short time horizon (3-5 years) to encourage immediate action. Inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic, the report sets out possible scenarios which are not predictions of the future, but instead invite us to imagine the different directions that the current and future pandemics might take and to expand the range of plausible futures. The scenarios are an opportunity to identify possible risks and solutions, discuss implications and propose actions aimed at preventing the occurrence or mitigating the impact of the current and future infectious threats.

The complex interplay of social, economic and structural drivers, including poverty, gender inequality, unequal power relationship , gender-based violence, social isolation and limited access to schooling increase the HIV vulnerability of women and girls. Furthermore these factors deprive them of voice and the ability to make decisions regarding their lives, reduce their ability to access services that meet their needs, increase their risks of violence or other harmful practices, and hamper their ability to mitigate the impact of AIDS. Adolescent girls and young women are more than twice as likely to acquire HIV as their male peers. AIDS-related illnesses remain one of the leading causes of death for women of reproductive age (aged 15 to 44 years) in Africa. In sub-Saharan Africa, young women and adolescent girls accounted for one in four new infections in 2019, despite making up about 10% of the total population. In addition, only about one third of young women in sub Saharan Africa have accurate, comprehensive knowledge about HIV. Nearly 30% of women aged 15 years and above have experienced gender-based violence with intimate partner violence ranging from 13% - 97%. During displacement and times of crisis, the risk of gender-based violence significantly increases for women and girls. Forty years of responding to HIV has taught the global community that a human rights-based approach is essential to create enabling environments for successful HIV responses and to affirm the dignity of people living with, or vulnerable to HIV. This study is timely and is set against the backdrop of several global and regional commitments that address systemic inequalities and those that respond to HIV including Africa’s Agenda 2063, Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, Maputo Plan of Action, and the 2021 Political declaration on AIDS. It highlight how gender intersects with other drivers of inequalities such as income, age, gender-based violence, stigma, discrimination and child marriage to exacerbate the vulnerability and susceptibility of women to HIV infection and also influence the health outcomes. Demands for social and gender transformative approaches are building as the HIV response reaches an important milestone and is moving towards the last mile. Countries have implemented several comprehensive best practice programmes focused on increasing the agency, economic empowerment and improving access to HIV and sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights (SRH&RR) services for adolescent girls and young women such as the DREAMS, SASA, HER programme and She Conquers with positive outcomes reported. Greater investments in these proven innovations is required to sustain and accelerate progress towards the 2030 goals. Member States have demonstrated political will and leadership to address HIV. Eastern and Southern Africa has provided leadership by increasing their domestic resource allocation to HIV programs by 26% between 2010 and 2019.

The measurement of non-market output, characterised by providing goods and services without economically significant prices, has always proved challenging for compilers of the National Accounts. Various approaches are available to meet these challenges, often resulting in slight differences in methodology between countries. Government policies, introduced in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic exacerbated some of these existing differences, potentially influencing the GDP estimates across countries. This joint paper by the United Kingdom Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) explains the methodological options available to statistical compilers and explores differences in methodologies used by countries to measure non-market output, analysing their implications for international comparisons of GDP growth during the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 hit the long-term care sector hard. This brief looks at mortality rates in care homes, as well as the policy responses undertaken during the pandemic. The brief assesses the emergency preparedness of the sector and highlights the lessons learned, including policies to reduce isolation, testing strategies, care workforce and co-ordination with the health care sector.