Webinar: Chinese and European Economy and China-Europe Cooperation in the Context of COVID-19

Webinar: Chinese and European Economy and China-Europe Cooperation in the Context of COVID-19

 

 

September 22, 2020, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, together with the Institute of European Studies and the China-CEE Institute, hosted a webinar on China-Europe economic cooperation in the Context of COVID-19.

Webinar experts have agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused new global challenges and the pandemic crisis goes beyond economic and financial matters. They firmly believe that, apart from all countries’ internal efforts, international cooperation is necessary for the European Union and China to tackle the pandemic crisis, which will bring long-term side effects.

 

Xie Fuzhan

 

Xie Fuzhan, president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said China’s “dual circulation” development pattern with the domestic market as a mainstay will promote China’s opening up. Xie proposed that China and Europe’s medium-term plans can provide a new opportunity for bilateral cooperation, such as China’s upcoming 14th Five-Year Plan and the EU’s recovery plan and its new multiannual financial framework (2021-2027).

 

Renaud Dehousse

 

Renaud Dehousse, President of the European University Institute, said the EU has learned lessons from the 2008 economic crisis, so its response to the COVID-19 crisis was more rapid and effective. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the crisis has exterted a great impact on the economy. As Christoph M. Schmidt, president of the RWI-Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, said, “The economic slump has bottomed out”, and “COVID-19 will weigh on global growth for quite some time”. Schmidt added that the EU will experience a threefold challenge: managing economic recovery, avoiding internal divergence, and maintaining global clout, stressing that global problems can only be solved through a global approach.

 

Webinar screen-shot

 

Daniel Gros, director of the Center for European Policy Studies, said lessons learned from the last crisis were usefully applied in the first half of 2020, focusing on the key things to prevent financial panic. However, the world needs new measures if thinking about the future. Gros expressed two points regarding the measures against the crisis. First, the pandemic-caused crisis is a recession different from those about financial market development. It’s a sectorial recession because people are not spending in peculiar sectors, such as tourism and services. Therefore, the challenge for the governments is to ensure intervention in the sectors where there are problems. Second, governments have to rethink and improve short-term work hours that employees work at home and companies get money from the governments. The question is how to make sure that economic aid doesn’t result in a frozen economy.

Kristof Lehmann, director for international monetary policy analysis and training of economic sciences at the Central Bank of Hungary, said the Chinese recovery plays an important role in the world’s recovery from the pandemic.

With regard to the changes that are reshaping the world, Bogdan Goralczyk, professor at the University of Warsaw in Poland, suggested “new vocabulary in the pandemic era”, including vaccine competition in political terms, pandemic elections in the United States, and how far countries will go back to nation-states. According to Goralczyk, turning into nation-states was the immediate reaction of many countries in face of the pandemic, which accelerated and will decide how deep deglobalization will become. Meanwhile, globalization needs a re-definition of the pandemic era.

 

Conference room

 

The webinar experts and participants had an extensive discussion on the pandemic crisis, its potential impact, and the possible solutions to the crisis. They shared the idea that enhanced international cooperation is both necessary and important when it comes to solving the pandemic crisis and respond to its impact.

 

 

Source: chinadaily.com.cn, online, September 23, 2020.