Suchergebnisse

Abstract
A lack of timely financing for purchases of vaccines and other health products impeded the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on analysis of contract signature and delivery dates in Covid-19 vaccine advance purchase agreements, this paper finds that 60–75 per cent of the delay in vaccine deliveries to low- and middle-income countries is attributable to their signing purchase agreements later than high-income countries, which placed them further behind in the delivery line. A pandemic Advance Commitment Facility with access to a credit line on day-zero of the next pandemic could allow low- and middle-income countries to secure orders earlier, ensuring a much faster and equitable global response than during Covid-19. The paper outlines four options for a financier to absorb some or all of the risk associated with the credit line and discusses how the credit would complement other proposals to strengthen the financing architecture for pandemic preparedness, prevention, and response.

Abstract
Pandemics and epidemics pose systemic risks to lives, societies, and to global economic security—and their frequency is expected to increase as rising trade and increased human interaction with animals leads to the emergence of new diseases. The Covid-19 pandemic teaches us that we can and must be better prepared, with scope for much greater global coordination to address the financing, supply-chain, and trade barriers that amplified the pandemic's economic costs and contributed to the emergence of new variants. This paper draws seven early lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic that could inform future policy priorities and help shape a better global response to future crises.

To examine the drivers of innovation, this paper studies the global R&D effort to fight the deadliest diseases and presents four results. We find: (1) global pharmaceutical R&D activity – measured by clinical trials – typically follows the 'law of diminishing efforts': i.e. the elasticity of R&D effort with respect to market size is about 1/2 in the cross-section of diseases; (2) the R&D response to COVID-19 has been a major exception to this law, with the number of COVID-19 trials being 7 to 20 times greater than that implied by its market size; (3) the aggregate short-term elasticity of science and innovation can be very large, as demonstrated by aggregate flow of clinical trials increasing by 38% in 2020, with limited crowding out of trials for non-COVID diseases; and (4) public institutions and government-led incentives were a key driver of the COVID-19 R&D effort – with public research institutions accounting for 70 percent of all COVID-19 clinical trials globally and being 10 percentage points more likely to conduct a COVID-19 trial relative to private firms. Overall, while economists are naturally in favor of market size as a driving force for innovation (i.e."if the market size is sufficiently large then innovation will happen"), our work suggests that scaling up global innovation may require a broader perspective on the drivers of innovation – including early-stage incentives, non-monetary incentives, and public institutions.