This policy essay, written as a UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) Working Paper, reflects on the social factors underlying Pakistan's chronic debt crises, their resolution, and potential paths to future prevention. It stresses the need for a debtors' perspective...

Individuals of vulnerable groups or people with underlying diseases can be voluntarily invited to restrict themselves for a period of time and to be accommodated in hotel facilities, which will be closed to external communications and are currently suspended.

This paper investigates how persistent changes in trust caused by the Great Recession have affected how governments and citizens across Europe responded to the next global crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that increases in individualism and mistrust towards institutions caused by...

Health care systems need to be resilient to deal with disasters like the global spread of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) on top of serving the changing needs of a multi-morbid, ageing and often dispersed population. This paper identifies, discusses and augments...

Phenomenal increases in food prices in 2007 and 2008 caused governments around the globe to panic. During the chaos which ensued, most developing countries responded to the crisis with a convoluted array of policies intended to stabilize domestic markets, placate consumers and other...

The development policy in Indonesia to implement the human development paradigm should be able to put people as actors and regional economic development as a vehicle for the public welfare. However, the government's policy as outlined in the budget form precisely the opposite direction to a...

Es existiert wohl keinerlei «Präzedenzfall», der in irgendeiner Weise vergleichbar wäre mit der vollkommenen Verwandlung des derzeitigen griechischen Ministerpräsidenten Alexis Tsipras und dessen Anpassung an die Anforderungen der griechischen Realität. Wahrhaft, all zu rasch übersetzte...

While degraded trust and cohesion within a country are often shown to have large socioeconomic impacts, they can also have dramatic consequences when compliance is required for collective survival. We illustrate this point in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. Policy responses all over the...

We analyze consumer sentiment with a novel survey of Thai and Vietnamese consumers conducted in May 2020, that is, shortly after the end of the immediate lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In a randomized control trial, we expose subgroups of the survey respondents to four different...

This paper uses the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study to investigate the direct and indirect effect of beliefs of others on respondent's own beliefs and on their individual consumer sentiment. In a new online consumer survey with randomized control trials (RCTs) in Thailand and Vietnam, we...