NURS 3335 Current Health Issues and Trends

It is expected that you will answer the following questions after viewing the videos and articles on the 1918-1919 Spanish Flu pandemic and reading the accompanying prompts:

What can we learn from this historic event in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, for example?

2. What are your feelings and thoughts on the current situation?

What are you doing to deal with this?
Hopefully, some of what you’ve learned in this course, such as the importance of sleep, exercise, stress reduction and proper nutrition, will help you deal with your situation.

COVID-19 has affected millions of people around the world, and there is a strong likelihood that many more will be affected in the near future.
A corona virus vaccine is currently a hot topic in the media.

Is this vaccine something you’re concerned about?

Would you consent to a shot of this substance?
What’s the point?
Be respectful and professional in your responses to your peers, as this is a contentious subject with differing viewpoints.)

Please respond to each of these five questions in your original post with at least three to four well-written sentences.

NURS 3335 Current Health Issues and Trends

There are NO references required for this discussion board. This is discussion is simply meant for you to reflect upon these questions.

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, levels and trends in domestic revenues and external flows to developing economies were already considered insufficient to support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). With high levels of public debt and additional pressures induced by the pandemic on all major sources of development finance, low- and middle-income countries may struggle to finance their public health, social and economic responses to COVID-19. Early observations point to massive debt and equity outflows from developing economies that accompany a drop in remittances, and ripple effects on domestic finance already solicited by the unfolding public health and economic crises. In this challenging context, how can we avoid a development finance collapse that would send millions back into poverty, and compromise our capacity to reach the SDGs, our common blueprint for a stronger, fairer, and more sustainable world?

This note draws upon research carried out in the context of the OECD Global Outlook on Financing for Sustainable Development (OECD, forthcoming[1]) and outlines the current and projected impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on major sources of financing required to deliver support to developing economies.

Key messages

The COVID-19 crisis is hitting developing economies at a critical moment. Prior to the crisis, financing had already fallen short of the spending needs to achieve the SDGs by 2030, and fiscal space was limited by rising public debt levels and servicing costs.
The COVID-19 crisis risks creating major setbacks in financing for sustainable development. Domestic resource mobilisation will suffer as economic activity is reduced. Inflows of external private finance are projected to drop by USD 700 billion compared to 2019 levels, exceeding the impact of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis by 60%. Fiscal space is likely to narrow further with rising domestic spending and exchange rate movements against the USD.
In the short term, official development finance should be leveraged to contain the drop in other sources of financing. Already scarce resources coupled with the economic impact of the crisis imply that developing economies might struggle to finance adequate public health and social and economic responses. No single source of financing will be enough to close the COVID-19 financing gap.
In the medium-term, actors in development finance and beyond need to collaborate closely to “build back better” for a more equitable, sustainable and thus resilient world. In development finance, while domestic resource mobilisation will remain the only long-term viable source of financing for many public goods and services, building back better will require action from all financing sources with the common goal to aid national sustainable development strategies. Beyond development finance, there is, for instance, a need to revitalise trade and, in the case of small island developing states, promote a sustainable ocean economy.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is hitting developing economies at a critical moment

At the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, financing for sustainable development was already in a critical condition (OECD, 2018[2]). In 2014, UNCTAD had estimated the SDG financing gap in developing economies at USD 2.5 trillion (2014[3]). More recently, Gaspar et al. (2019[4]) estimated that low-income countries would need to spend, on average, an additional 15.4 percentage points of gross domestic product (GDP) and emerging economies an additional 4 percentage points of GDP to fill their SDG spending gaps. While the gap can be explained in part by sub‑par spending efficiency, it is well established that pre-COVID‑19 levels of domestic and external resources were insufficient to meet the SDGs (UN SG, 2019[5]). In addition, margins of manoeuvre to close the gap had been limited by high debt levels.

Pre-COVID-19 domestic finance

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, tax revenue, the major form of domestic public resources and single largest source of development finance, had been insufficient in a large number of countries, particularly in comparison to the SDG spending needs. Out of 124 countries eligible for official development assistance (ODA) with published data on tax revenue in 2017, more than one third (46) have had tax-to-GDP ratios below 15%, which is a widely considered benchmark for effective state functioning and to promote economic development (Gaspar, Jaramillo and Wingender, 2016[6]). Almost two-thirds of countries in this sample (79) had collected tax revenue below 20% of GDP.

Further, it appears that average growth in tax revenue to GDP had decelerated in recent years. For a sample of 26 African countries, unweighted average tax-to-GDP ratios had remained stagnant at around 17.2% between 2015 and 2017 (OECD, 2019[7]). In response to the Global Financial Crisis in 2008-09, average tax revenue declined in lower and upper middle-income countries (). Since then, average revenue collected as a share of national income had not fully recovered with average growth remaining bumpy and fairly stagnant over a medium perspective. In contrast, low-income countries experienced more persistent increases in average tax revenue over 2002-17 but growth had decelerated somewhat after 2012. In Latin America and the Caribbean, tax revenues had been slowly increasing as a result of favourable economic conditions in 2017 and 2018, but the more recent resource price falls and social unrest meant that the revenue outlook had been weakening even prior to the COVID-19 crisis (OECD et al., 2020[8]).

Other domestic resources similarly provide important financial means for spending and investment in support of sustainable development. Analysis carried out for the OECD Global Outlook on Financing for Sustainable Development (OECD, forthcoming[1]) suggests that domestic savings had been increasing in developing economies as a share of GDP between 2016-18 but savings had remained significantly smaller in low-income than middle-income countries. Domestic private investment is the main source of fixed capital formation but data availability is only comprehensive for around one-third of developing economies. The domestic financial sector plays a central role in intermediating savings and borrowing (respectively investment) but access to financial institutions and markets had remained more limited in low- and lower middle-income countries, and borrowing costs are often high.

NURS 3335 Current Health Issues and Trends