This introductory article outlines how Global Political Economy and the nuanced perspectives of scholars from this interdiscipline navigate claims about the origins and consequences of, as well as responses to, the COVID-19 pandemic. Emerging social scientific assessments have tended to understand the pandemic as either an entirely novel crisis (“everything has changed”) or one merely extending preexisting economic and political tensions (“nothing has changed”). Early analyses of political-economic aspects of the crisis assembled in this collection instead highlight both patterns of continuity and change—and the importance of situating changes within prepandemic continuities—that have emerged during the first year of the global pandemic. This introductory article brings together suggestions by and for Global Political Economy scholars, as well as social scientists more generally, for further researching key dynamics shaping the global political economy in the COVID-19 era as it keeps unfolding and evolving.

This commentary identifies a key dilemma in immediate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic: the persistent foregrounding of digital technologies as “silver-bullet” solutions to overcoming tensions between surveillance and privacy. It illustrates the pandemic techno-solutionist dilemma by pointing to global efforts to harness blockchain technologies for “squaring the circle” between privacy and surveillance. It then concludes that further investigating the persistence and possible inevitability of this dilemma requires overcoming solitudes both within international political economy and between international political economy and interdisciplines such as surveillance studies.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, several states introduced and expanded regulatory frameworks for screening (and potentially blocking) inward foreign direct investment. This shift accelerated a preexisting trend in the global political economy, as states have been widening their understanding of “national security” risks arising from foreign investment. The result is that such screening mechanisms are evolving from a niche subject to a broader regulatory tool that touches an expanding share of global economic activity. The tensions inherent in this shift—including how firms will respond, how states can evaluate systemic (rather than transactional) risk, and the potential and limits of international cooperation in investment screening—have not yet been resolved.

This essay revisits the developed/developing country division in the global economy in the light of the economic repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic. A trend that precedes the pandemic has been a seeming detachment of the binary distinction between “developed” versus “developing” countries and what has been described as growing economic diversity in the so-called “developing world.” While emerging markets such as Brazil, India, or China have been able to catch up economically with the “developed” world, many African, Middle Eastern, or South Asian countries are increasingly marginalized in the global economy. At the same time, there is an increasing recognition that poverty is rising within the so-called “developed” world. Against this context, we investigate whether the economic repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic reinforce this trend and further blur the developed/developing country divide in the global economy. We find a nuanced picture that contains elements of both continuity and change: while the short-term implications of the COVID-19 pandemic cut across the developed/developing country distinction, its long-term economic repercussions largely reiterate the divide—with the exception of China among the emerging markets.

The global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 brutally exposed the vulnerabilities of hyperconnected just-in-time production networks. It was met by prominent calls by business and political leaders to prioritize resilience over efficiency and to reshore global production. About one year later, this commentary provides an early assessment of the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic has altered the political economy of globalized production. Rather than fundamentally changing the structural organization of multinational corporations, it is argued, the pandemic highlighted and accelerated important trends that were already well underway before the outbreak of the pandemic. Even though the COVID-19 crisis has not fundamentally altered infrastructures of global production, there are indications that transnational production networks may be in the process of bifurcating further into US- and China-centered spheres—with more cross-border integration within but less across the two—in the years to come.

A study conducted in March 2021 by the United Nations Development Programme and the Pardee Center for International Futures at the University of Denver estimated that the multi-dimensional effects of the Covid-19 crisis could drive over 1 billion people to be living in extreme poverty by 2030 (UNDP 2021) if no action is taken to mitigate the impacts of the crisis. This echoes wider concerns about the impacts of the pandemic on global needs and transnational solidarity. Against this background, this commentary proposes IPE research draws on analytical distinctions between (1) public and private aid; (2) the quantitative and qualitative aspects of aid projects; and (3) the different motivations driving aid to analyse the evolution of aid flows in times of pandemic. With these distinctions in mind, I argue that there are reasons to believe that, despite the global economic depression, aid volumes may remain relatively stable over the coming years. Nevertheless, the current pandemic may re-orient aid flows away from the most urgent needs, requiring scholars to focus more on the quality than quantity of international aid flows in the era of Covid-19.

This commentary for the “Political Economy Section COVID-19 Collection’’ discusses ideational continuity and change at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that, despite an initial advice to increase the government spending, the Fund has later reverted back to the market orthodoxy recommending fiscal discipline and balanced government budget in the longer-term. The piece argues that, although a global crisis and increased government spending by influential member states such as the United States might have prompted an ideational shift at the Fund, a lack of clear theorization of longer-term Keynesian policies in academic circles and in the economics profession, prevented a paradigmatic change at the Fund.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerates and exacerbates many preexisting tendencies in the global political economy. Consequently, the crisis of the liberal international order (LIO), which has been ongoing for several years, is also being affected by the pandemic. These effects are, however, not uniform: some aspects of the crisis of the LIO, as a multidimensional phenomenon, are under more pressure than others. In this article, I detail these varied effects with a specific focus on questions of geopolitics and hegemonic change. I argue that especially the societal level, where socioeconomic distortions and popular discontent are long-existing drivers of crisis, will be severely hit by the social and economic fallout of the pandemic. I conclude by suggesting a set of hypotheses regarding the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the crisis of the LIO that can be tested once more data becomes available.

This forum contribution highlights the confluence of two distinct trends in the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. On one hand, many of the worst socio-economic costs of the virus and control measures have been disproportionately borne by marginalized workers, primarily in the global south. Often these impacts have not overlapped with the public health costs of the virus itself. In this sense the pandemic has highlighted the ways that risks in the global political economy are unevenly and systematically distributed. On the other, early indications are that highly individualized notions of ‘risk management’ and ‘resilience’ will be central to post-crisis global development agendas. At the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic has made the systemic and unequal nature of risks in the global political economy visible, then, many of the most marginalized segments of the world’s population are being asked to take responsibility for managing those risks.