PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A pandemic that won't go away. Global maneuvering by Russia, China, and Iran. American politics and the stability of democracy.
These are some of the top global risks of 2022, in the view of Eurasia Group Global Macro Practice Senior Analyst Ali Wyne. His group created the full list of top global risks this year.
Yet Wyne sees some interrelationships between numerous issues involving these global powers. How they handle these issues, including China's COVID-19 containment policy, has a global ripple effect.
"China's sheer scale, it has 1.4 billion people. So the world's largest population, it presides over the world's second-largest economy. And so anything that happens in China, almost by definition, is going to have global reverberations for geopolitics and for economics," said Wyne.
"China remains the world's manufacturing hub. It occupies such a commanding position with global supply chains. If China is cracking down even more to contain the pandemic, then the extant supply chain disruptions that we've seen over the past two years, they're only going to get worse. And so what we worry about is a linkage between enforcement of what we think is an increasingly untenable COVID containment strategy in China, and the extent to which that continuation will exacerbate supply chain disruptions."
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Wyne believes those disruptions could bring an even greater disparity in both health and economics between developed and developing economies, especially in a pandemic - something that could tie into the third problem he describes, the state of democracy in the U.S.
"It's going to heighten a lot of nationalistic sentiment, it's going to heighten a lot of populistic sentiment. People are tired. People are frustrated. People want to get on with their lives, but there's a feeling there's a tremendous feeling of uncertainty. There's a feeling of frustration, a feeling of disillusionment with governments," said Wyne.
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"It brings together trends in economics. It brings together trends in politics. I don't want to say that it wraps a neat bow around because it's a very sobering bow, but it really brings together a lot of these big-picture trends."
During this KYW Newsradio In Depth episode, Wyne dives deeper into the relationship between COVID-19, economics and geopolitics, the increased power of mega-technology companies on our daily lives and issues governments have with them, and the U.S. midterm elections with their potential effect on the 2024 presidential elections, democracy in general and its effect on America's relationship with other nations.
Listen below in your podcast player.