Chapter 4 provides an overview of today’s global refugee crisis, driven by perspectives of refugees around the world. The Syrian war has displaced a stunning half of Syria’s prewar population, with nearly 80,000 of those Syrians having fled to nearby Za'atari; the UN calls it “the biggest humanitarian and refugee crisis of our time.” But it is only a part of a broader global crisis: today, more people than at any other time in history have been forcibly displaced from their homes. More than twenty-six million refugees, over half of whom are children, have fled their home countries entirely. This chapter provides a brief exploration of the major crises causing displacement, from instability in Central America and Afghanistan, to the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, to wars in South Sudan and Yemen. And it considers where most refugees end up: in host cities, in refugee camps, and – unfortunately only on rare occurences – resettled permanently in adoptive cities. It discusses how, due to continuing conflicts and tightening restrictions on acceptance of refugees, refugee camps are increasingly becoming like permanent settlements, despite their intended role as temporary safe havens.

INTRODUCTION: DEVELOPMENT ENTAILS EQUALIZING OPP ORTUNITIES

A society – even one that has achieved a high level of average income, education and public health outcomes – cannot be considered developed if its ordinary citizens do not believe that life is fair. But what exactly is fairness? However varied, most answers have their root in some notion of equality – equality before the law, equality of representation in politics, and so on. Building upon the work of one of the present authors (Roemer, 1996, 1998) we propose that fairness means that citizens have equal opportunities to achieve their goals. We will define the roles played by choices and circumstances in the origins of inequality and go on to propose metrics for measuring, and policies for achieving, equality of opportunity. We will conclude with a set of recommendations for policymakers.

We consider the goals of citizens as those that prior work in development has identified as important and influential in policy: Individuals seek to achieve a high income, good health, the empowerment afforded by education and other such objectives as measured and reported in past United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Reports. We will refer to these goals as the objectives of individuals.

What does it mean for individuals to have equal opportunities to achieve these objectives? We postulate three categories of inputs that determine their success in achieving these objectives. The first set of factors are the individual's choices, which includes the effort she puts in, the decision of which sector to work in, and so on. The second set includes those that we call the individual's circumstances, which are outside her control. This includes all individual-specific factors relevant for success but which the individual did not choose. For example, individuals do not choose the ethnic group to which they belong, the socioeconomic status of their families of origin, their rural or urban background, or their gender. But it is evident that these things will matter at least to a degree in determining their lot in life. Individuals ought to be held responsible for their choices, but not their circumstances. The final category is public policy which shapes the economic and social environment in which individuals live, the benefits they receive and, importantly, the relative importance of their circumstances versus their choices.

INTRODUCTION

As the pandemic continues course into the second year, it is now widely recognized that it has worsened inequalities and exposed the longstanding fragilities and fractures in national and global governance (The Independent Panel, 2021; IMF, 2020; Oxfam, 2020b). The inequities in access to healthcare, the toll of job losses falling on low-wage workers, the burden of unpaid care work falling on women and escalating gender violence have magnified already existing vulnerabilities and powerlessness among marginalized groups. Vaccine nationalism and the weakness of multilateral cooperation in arranging universal access to COVID-19 vaccinations expose the economic and political fault lines of the 21st Century global order.

As Patel and Sridhar (2020) comment in the Lancet Regional Health, “the relative global success to control the COVID-19 pandemic, keep their economies afloat and avoid longer, harsh lockdown measures are markedly skewed towards the Asia-Pacific region”. This success has depended largely on the effective implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), combined with strong institutional capacity: primary health systems, effective leadership and active public engagement. This chapter further highlights how these successes reflect the importance of institutional capacity. The aim of this chapter is to review the consequences of the pandemic and the national responses to the public health and socioeconomic crises in order to learn lessons for governing pandemics, now and in the future. The analysis uses the framework of human development and capability approach and considers the objectives of pandemic governance to extend beyond stopping the spread of the virus and addresses broader socioeconomic and human consequences (Sen, 1999).

Our analysis finds that, while many countries of the regions have had relative success in containing the epidemic outbreak so far, their strategies raise questions about equity, participation and human rights issues. Moreover, many of the low- and middle-income countries in the region have felt some of the strongest effects from the global recession. These complex challenges expose some key gaps in national and global institutions that require priority policy attention. The chapter highlights three of them: the underfunding of public health infrastructure; global norms for the provision of global public goods, notably vaccines; and the protection of low-wage workers in the global economy.

INTRODUCTION

Earth's third largest storage of frozen water after Antarctica and the Arctic lies in the high mountains of Asia. This has prompted the region's nickname: the Third Pole. Centred on the Tibetan Plateau, this region contains every peak on Earth taller than 7,000 metres. The Himalayan arc flanks the region's south, starting from northern Myanmar in the east, spanning several thousand kilometres (km) to the southern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, the northern edge of northeast India, and across Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal and the western Himalayan states of India. Separated from the Western Himalaya by the arid Ladakh Valley, the Karakoram range extends north-westwards, connecting to the Hindu Kush Mountains on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border. Together these ranges form the Hindu Kush Karakoram Himalaya (HKH). The Hengduan and Quilian Mountains sit at the eastern side of the Tibetan Plateau, with the Kunlun on the northwest and north. The Pamir Mountains extend north from the Hindu Kush, shared by Afghanistan, China, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Further north are the Tien Shan Mountains, shared by China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and extending eastwards around the northern edge of the arid Tarim Basin. Figure 2.1 shows a map of High Mountain Asia and its sub-regions.

High Mountain Asia's frozen water, its cryosphere, is stored in several different forms, including in snowfields, glaciers, permafrost and seasonal ice on lakes and rivers. In 2015, glaciers covered almost 100,000 square km3 of High Mountain Asia, containing 3,000-4,700 cubic km of ice (Bolch et al., 2019), with just under half in the Himalaya and Karakoram (Nie et al., 2021). During winters, large parts of High Mountain Asia experience snowfall, while many lakes and high altitude stretches of rivers freeze. When glaciers retreat, vacated depressions often fill with water, forming glacial lakes. The exact number of glacial lakes is not firmly established, and varies in time; estimates range from 4,260 to 8,200 for the HKH region, including 1,466 to 2,323 lakes in Nepal alone (Bolch et al., 2019).

Chapter 9 is about the present impact of the three entrepreneurs’ ventures, alongside many others, on the Za'atari community. A far cry from its makeshift origins, Za'atari is now much like a city. The Shams-Élysées, the Saudi Market, and other areas are buzzing as more than 3,000 businesses generate about $13 million in revenue a month and serve community members. These include bird shops, a cinema, sustainable farming solutions, and, of course, the ventures launched by Yasmina, Asma, and Malak. Yasmina is bringing profound joy into the lives of women across Za'atari. She helps brides feel special, valued, and beautiful, sometimes after a long period of feeling forgotten. Asma is uplifting Za'atari's children to reach for their highest aspirations. Much to her delight, her apprentice Nawara creates her own version of the storytelling initiative that is widely attended. In addition to running her studio with Treza, Malak repeatedly uses her art to empower the children around her, especially on the issue of child marriage. She designs twenty powerful drawings that are presented to girls during a workshop, empowering them to push back against such arrangements.

This chapter connects fraudulent conveyance principles to the practices that judges adopted during the reorganization of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe and the other great railroads that failed in the second half of the nineteenth century. The benchmarks judges put in place during this era established the ground rules for bargaining among investors for the next several decades. Judges did not try to shape the outcome of the negotiations. Instead they ensured that deals were only struck honestly and in good faith. There had to be a process that gave everyone a fair opportunity to participate.

Chapter 8 describes the extraordinary obstacles facing refugee entrepreneurs and explains why – despite these challenges – refugees excel as entrepreneurs. Refugees face the steepest of uphill climbs, dealing with everything from trauma to a lack of access to credit to discrimination to limited networks. Still, they are much more likely to be entrepreneurs than native-born citizens. Refugees’ sparks are not accidental; they have unique qualities based on their experiences that make them more likely to come up with, and successfully see through, startup ideas. First, many refugees innovate because it is their only way to survive, and are thus immensely committed. For Yasmina, innovating was a requirement to feed her children. Second, refugees benefit from exposure to other cultures' ideas and markets. One appeal of Malak's work is her ability to infuse Syrian flair. Third, refugees, far from home, are often intensely motivated to meet the needs of their new neighbors and find innovations to do just that – as Asma did for Za'atari. Fourth, they are often pushed to entrepreneurship by employment discrimination. Fifth, they have an unmatched level of resilience.

In Chapter 1, a subsidy was defined as the purchase of a product, such as labour power, or an environmental service, such as water, below their cost of production. The cost of production of a commodity is the sum of the various inputs that go into its making, plus a normal profit for capital. This is Marx's prices of production or also a neo-Keynesian definition of cost. The difference between the cost of production and the price of the product, however, does not just disappear from the value chain. The cost is incurred somewhere, either in the household where labour is reproduced or within the environment. If this incurred cost is not compensated, it appears as a subsidy extracted from the household or environment.

The extraction of the subsidy takes place in multiple locations: the factory and other sites of production, such as worker and farmer households, and also the environment. Thus, it may seem that the subsidy is being provided to or benefiting the producer, which is the factory owner in the value chain. However, monopsony relations in the value chain result in the capture of that subsidy by the brands, who are able to keep supplier prices down to incurred monetary costs. Thus, there is a distinction between the site of subsidy extraction, which is the supplier factory, and the site of its capture, which occurs through the monopsony relation between brands and suppliers. This is important in the analysis of global value chains (GVCs), such as that of garments, where the monopsony structure of the input market enables the capture of subsidy by the brands even when the extraction of that subsidy takes place under the management of the supplier or local authorities in supplier countries.

Consequently, since the subsidy (in terms of lower prices of inputs) translates into lower ex-factory prices of garments, the subsidies are reverse subsidies to brands—from gendered labour, farmer households, and the environment. These are reverse subsidies in two senses. The first is that they are extracted from the weakest and worst-off in the value chain. The second is that they do not accrue to supplier firms; rather, through the monopsony structure, they are transferred to the brands.