The journal review. The pandemic has swept away the hope of the international community to eradicate extreme poverty in the world by 2030. “This is the most spectacular and longest-term result of the Covid year” notes the review “Politique Foreign”, published by the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), which devotes in its spring issue a rich dossier to “Rebound of poverty”. “The pandemic and its economic consequences definitely dampen the optimism of the two decades preceding the crisis”, notes in his introductory article Julien Damon, teacher at Sciences Po and HEC, who has been working on the subject for several years.
In 2020, the health crisis has already caused an increase in the number of poor estimated at 100 million people, according to the approach restricted to the classic threshold of the World Bank – is poor who earns less than 1.90 dollars a day -, up to ‘to some 500 million people, according to two expanded calculations by the World Bank and UNDP based on a threshold set at less than $ 5.50 per day.
In this same dossier, Georges Courade, honorary research director of the Research Institute for Development, analyzes the case of Africa with its resilience. Sophie Mitra, professor at Fordham University in New York, analyzes the misery in the United States and the hopes that Joe Biden’s first measures may arouse. The director of the French Development Agency, Rémy Rioux, and Jean-David Naudet, researcher, recalled that the rich countries have mobilized $ 12 trillion to deal with Covid-19 at home. Official development assistance represents only 150 billion per year.
The rejection of multilateralism
Appearing in all its evidence with the pandemic, the crisis of multilateralism is the second major subject of this spring issue with in particular a long analysis on what “We can expect the UN today”. Former Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations, in charge of peacekeeping operations (2000-2008), Jean-Marie Guéhenno observes the existential crisis of what was after the Second World War “A largely American invention” – part of a universalism nourished by the Enlightenment – now openly rejected by China.
“During the cold war, the division of the world between the West and the USSR opposed two equally universalist visions”, notes Mr. Guéhenno emphasizing “That it is not the same with China which does not display any pretension to universalism except in its affirmation of the universal right of each society to its difference”. A point of view, moreover, widely shared among the emerging powers or revanchists, determined to question the international order as it was structured after the Second World War.
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