Pandemic Analysis I: Global Governance for a Global Pandemic?

A global pandemic is a globally shared good or experience. It then begs the question of whether a globally coordinated action or treaty should be in place to address it most efficiently. This chapter shows that there is no treaty at the present time to address a global pandemic and only a weak global governance. The World Health Organization (WHO) which is given the authority as a global health organization has only a small fraction of its total budget on health emergencies while its roles during the pandemics given under the International Health Regulations (IHR) are severely limited. During the COVID-19 pandemic, policy responses to the pandemic were being actively initiated by national control centers, that is, influenced little by a global treaty or international cooperation. The rationale for such decentralized and polycentric decisions and actions with urgency can be explained by three salient features: a high possibility of a backstop vaccine, a high degree of excludability, and a disparate impact of the pandemic across the countries. The effective responses to a global pandemic observed during the COVID-19 can be meaningfully compared with the policy responses to other globally shared goods, in particular, global climate challenges.