Independent review of emergency economic stimulus measures: Global Financial Crisis and COVID-19

Major government emergency interventions demand, and generally receive, independent scrutiny. This article looks back at reviews of the Australian government's economic stimulus measures introduced in the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), in anticipation of reviews of responses to the COVID-19 emergency, noting similarities and differences between the two crises. We examine 10 independent reviews of the Australian government's response to the GFC with a particular focus on their nature and the context in which they occurred. As a result, we identify five themes: when and how often reviews are conducted; recognition of context; the need for clear program objectives; explicit design principles; and governance. We develop a typology of independent reviews that has three key and interrelated dimensions: purpose, timing, and reviewer. We observe that there was patchwork coverage of the GFC measures, with no single report providing a holistic assessment of what was achieved or lessons learnt. We contend that, notwithstanding differences between crises, the typology will aid understanding of the role, key issues, and contributions of reviews that have already been, or will be, commissioned into COVID-19 and future emergency economic stimulus measures.     

Political trust during the Covid-19 pandemic: Rally around the flag or lockdown effects?

How can we explain the rise in diffuse political support during the Covid-19 pandemic? Recent research has argued that the lockdown measures generated political support. In contrast, I argue that the intensity of the pandemic rallied people around political institutions. Collective angst in the face of exponentially rising Covid-19 cases depresses the usual cognitive evaluations of institutions and leads citizens to rally around existing intuitions as a lifebuoy. Using a representative Dutch household survey conducted over March 2020, I compare the lockdown effect to the dynamic of the pandemic. I find that the lockdown effect is driven by pre-existing time trends. Accounting for non-linearities in time makes the lockdown effect disappear. In contrast, more flexible modelling techniques reveal a robust effect of Covid-19 infections on political trust. In line with an anxiety effect, I find that standard determinants of political trust – such as economic evaluations and social trust – lose explanatory power as the pandemic spreads. This speaks to an emotionally driven rally effect that pushes cognitive evaluations to the background.     

Zur Pflicht des Verwalters, die Einberufung und Abhaltung von Eigentümerversammlungen zu unterstützen; Weitergabe von Zustellanschriften

Es geh?rt zum Umfang der einen Hausverwalter nach § 20 Abs 1 WEG 2002 treffenden Verpflichtung, auf Verlangen Wohnungseigentümern die ihm bekannt gegebenen Zustellanschriften zu übermitteln. Diese Verpflichtung findet jedoch dort ihre Grenze, wo der Verwalter durch entgegengesetzte Weisungen von Miteigentümern in einen Interessenkonflikt ger?t (hier: ausdrücklich erkl?rter Wunsch von Wohnungseigentümern, von einem bestimmten anderen Wohnungseigentümer nicht durch Kontaktaufnahmen behelligt zu werden).     

Eintragung eines Bestandrechts ins Grundbuch – dingliche Wirkung der "Einverleibung"?

Zwar spricht § 19 GBG von der "Einverleibung oder Vormerkung von Bestandrechten" und § 1095 ABGB beim eingetragenen Bestandvertrag von einem dazu gewordenen "dinglichen Recht". In Wirklichkeit ?hnelt aber die grundbücherliche Eintragung eines Bestandrechts eher einer Anmerkung; ihre Rechtsfolgen beschr?nken sich – und zwar blo? im Verh?ltnis zwischen Bestandgeber und Bestandnehmer ohne allgemeine dingliche Wirkung gegenüber Dritten! – auf § 1120 und § 1121 ABGB.     

确立并践行新理念是形式主义问题的治本之策——以新冠肺炎疫情防控为例

形式主义是个老大难问题,治理起来相当困难。在新冠肺炎疫情防控过程中,尤其是在初期和一些地方,形式主义问题不仅存在还比较严重。在防控疫情这一“准战时”状态下,形式主义问题危害性更大。形式主义问题的根源是官僚主义,而官僚主义的形成有体制和思想两个层面的原因。从这两个层面施治,都属于治本之策,其中思想或理念层面的引领尤为重要。党的十八大以来,习近平总书记倡导并形成了三大新理念,即问题导向、结果导向和民意导向。与新理念相对立的旧理念正是形式主义问题的思想根源。新理念不只是理念,还是一套行动指南。只要确立并践行新理念,就能有效抑制形式主义问题的滋生,从而起到重要的治本作用。     

中缅公共卫生安全合作:现状、挑战及前景

随着中缅两国友好关系的稳步发展,两国公共卫生安全合作不断深化.新冠肺炎危机爆发以来,中缅积极开展抗疫合作,深化了两国政府和人民对中缅命运共同体的认同,也为两国推进公共卫生安全合作带来新机遇.除了双边合作外,中缅还在中国-东盟、大湄公河次区域经济合作和澜湄合作等区域性合作机制下积极寻求联合抗疫等公共卫生领域的交流与合作,并利用世界卫生组织等国际平台参与全球卫生治理,取得了良好成效.但是,缅甸脆弱的公共卫生体系,中缅边境地区严峻的非传统安全问题,以及缅甸不稳定的社会基础等因素对中缅深化公共卫生安全合作构成了巨大挑战.为此,中国应利用后疫情时代公共卫生安全领域的合作机遇,深入了解缅甸公共卫生体系建设和民众卫生健康的实际需求,进一步拓展双方的合作空间,为中缅公共卫生安全合作创造有利环境.概而言之,中缅应围绕加强信息共享,推进中缅应对传染病联防联控体系常态化建设;注重能力建设,利用多边平台增强缅甸的公共卫生治理能力;加强健康教育,联合开展公共卫生人才培养计划;利用传统优势,充分激发中缅传统医药合作潜能;鼓励多方参与,有效发挥非政府组织在卫生合作中的作用等方面共同努力,从而进一步推动中缅命运共同体建设.     

How the Global Pandemic Intensifies Vulnerabilities for Colombia's Women Social Leaders

Women social leaders in Colombia say that the biggest danger posed by the global pandemic comes not from contracting the virus, but rather from non-state armed groups taking advantage of the quarantine to violently pursue social and territorial control. This article details three phenomena that highlight how existing vulnerabilities for women social leaders have been sharpened by the global pandemic: (a) women's community work increases while state and institutional support decrease; (b) armed groups' ability to target violence increases while women's ability to self-protect decreased; and (c) armed groups' ability to act with impunity is increasing as access to justice is limited.     

Putting Large-Scale Infrastructure Projects First: The COVID-19 Pandemic in Indigenous Mexico

This article argues that whilst indigenous people are central to the Mexican president's official developmentalist discourse of bringing prosperity to the country's marginalised and poor, their needs during the COVID-19 pandemic have not been met and their interests have been sidelined. Whilst experiencing serious loss of trading revenue, negative impacts of misinformation, and lack of access to appropriate healthcare, indigenous Mexicans also faced the aggressive advance on their territories of large-scale infrastructure projects, which have become the backbone of the president's strategy for countering the economic recession caused by the pandemic. The discontinuation of relevant legal means to challenge the advance of the megaprojects during the pandemic effectively threatened indigenous people's democratic rights to protect their land, identities and way of life.     

The Worst Is Not over Yet: The Lives and Deaths of the ‘Self’ and ‘Others’ in Brazil's Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper focuses on the politics of life and death in Bolsonaro's Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is argued that while this administration, and the president himself, have long supported violence against individuals and social groups they did not see as fully human, their response to the pandemic marked a public transition from valuing certain kinds of lives as opposed to others, to a general contempt for human lives. The paper explores this transition by discussing the reification of the economy to the detriment of the people who produce and consume.     

Fact Checking and Information in the Age of Covid

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed and accelerated an information crisis as well as a health one. What we discover about Covid 19, how it spreads, to whom and why and how best to mitigate it—all depend on information. The essays in this special section, which this article introduces, explore the importance of information and the fundamental role of fact checkers in understanding how information flows, why mistakes are made, and how to counteract them. Fact checking as an idea and a practice emerged in the early twenty-first century, developed as a positive beacon to counteract a growing sense that information could no longer be trusted. Now, more than a decade after its creation, fact checking sits within a far more complex and chaotic media context, and its expertise and understanding has never been so important. We need to understand what fact checkers do because they are grappling with how to tether us to reality.