IAS Current affairs - Disease Outbreaks and its Impact

Disease Outbreaks and its Impact

Context:

  • In the past decade the world has seen several outbreaks, due to which there has been serious impact socially and economically.
  • In this context it is important to analyse how the developing nations and developed countries have struggled to address the problem of inequity in access to life-saving products such as vaccines.

Background:

  • Unexpected changes in the economic environment, such as disease outbreaks, can create within-country spatial variability in business opportunities and problems for MNEs and domestic enterprises.
  • It is difficult to forecast how these various types of businesses would respond strategically to such changes.
  • On the one hand, incumbent MNEs may be better positioned to harness their global size and consolidate their market dominance across national regions.

Inequity Within:

  • The 2009-10 H1N1 influenza pandemic was used as a source of a dramatic spike in global demand for flu vaccines, according to a study.
  • Following this increase in demand, it was investigated how subnational heterogeneity in health-care infrastructure and political alignment between the federal/central and regional governments in India influence MNEs and domestic firms’ market share and revenues in the influenza vaccine market compared to non-influenza vaccine markets.

Other Factors:

  • The findings show that direct costs and opportunity costs are two distinguishing characteristics that might lead to variability in foreign and domestic business decision sets across locations within a country.
  • The findings directly speak to the difficulties, which policymakers across numerous emerging economies face; that is, the complex problem of recruiting foreign enterprises to supply vaccines while also seeking self-sufficiency in domestic vaccine production.
  • The findings of the study allow for the identification of which regions within a country may require greater governmental support in order to recruit various types of enterprises to supply life-saving products.

 

Source The Hindu