Why Home Advantage Disappears in Empty Football Stadiums Here's what 4 graphs tell us. by Carl Singleton, Dominik Schreyer and James Reade

For millions of football fans, we’ve had nothing but repeats to watch to get our fix in recent months. But starting from May 16, elite European football kicks off, courtesy of the German Bundesliga. But there will be a few differences.

Given that there will be a packed schedule of matches to finish before the end of July, teams can make five substitutions rather than the normal three. But the most obvious difference will be that these matches will take place without spectators. Games will be held in empty, cavernous stadiums. These will not be neutral venues, as has been proposed for completing the English Premier League, but research shows empty grounds can effectively mean a removal of “home” advantage.

A few studies show that home fans can influence the outcome of football matches through the pressure they put on the referee. There is evidence, for example, that referees award more injury time when the home team is losing and less when the home team is winning, systematically shortening or lengthening the game to favour the home team, and this is affected by how many fans are present.

Most results on the effects of fans are based on changes in a few hundred or thousand fans from one match to the next. We are among a few sports economists to have studied the effect of playing in closed stadiums.

Historically, most closed doors matches have been imposed on clubs and their fans as a punishment – for violence, racist abuse and corruption. Studying the history of European football since the second world war, we found 191 closed doors matches across the top Italian and French leagues, and in European club competitions. We found none in the English and German top leagues, and only one in Spain’s La Liga. Most of these matches were after 2002.

The number of closed door matches in European football by competition and season since 2002/03. Carl Singleton, Author provided

We have found that the considerable home advantage in football is on average almost entirely wiped out in closed doors matches. Historically, home teams win 46% of the time in matches with fans, but only 36% of the time when there are no fans. The away team wins 26% of the time with fans, and 34% without fans.

These differences are primarily because the home team scores fewer goals when there aren’t any fans. The chart below shows the average differences between matches with fans and without them since 2002, with negative values implying that an outcome was smaller or happened less often in closed doors matches, and vice versa for a positive value.

The outcomes in closed doors matches vs in all others since the beginning of the 2002-03 European football season. Bands show 95% confidence intervals. Carl Singleton, Author provided

Reasons for the difference

The data suggests at least two reasons for the loss of home advantage. The first is that away teams get punished differently by the referee. Small changes in the number of fans in the stadium normally have small effects. But as the graph below shows, we estimate that an away team would receive 0.5 fewer yellow cards when playing behind closed doors (the X on the diagram), whereas the effect of reducing a specific stadium’s 25,000 crowd down to a 6,000 one is a mere 0.05 of a card (black line on diagram). Closed door matches have a disproportionate and strong effect on yellow cards.

The estimated effects on how many yellow cards are awarded to the away team, depending on how many fans are present. Carl Singleton, Author provided

The second possible reason is that less injury time is awarded in matches played behind closed doors. Though, in the small sample of matches without fans we have studied so far, this difference is generally not statistically significant.

Second half injury time awarded in closed doors matches vs in all others since the beginning of the 2002-03 European football season. Bands show 95% confidence intervals. Carl Singleton, Author provided

To be clear, we are not accusing professional football referees of being consciously biased. Indeed research has shown that some of the biases they exhibit are subconscious, reflecting the highly pressurised environment that they must make tight calls in. Hence, the introduction of technology like the infamous VAR is an attempt to make the game more fair.

Fans turn up hoping to see their team win, and so, whatever causes it, there is an argument that some amount of home advantage is a good thing. It draws higher crowds and maintains their interest - only the diehards pay to watch their team lose every week.

A different game

Ultimately, our research suggests that professional football over the coming months is likely to be substantially different – not just the echoes of empty stadiums but in measurable outcomes as well. We can expect home teams to win less often. Teams with more home matches than away matches remaining in the current season might not do as well as they otherwise would have done, affecting championships, promotion and relegation.

The evidence also suggests that the current wrangling among the English Premier League’s clubs, about playing their remaining matches at neutral venues, is based on a mistaken notion that home advantage wouldn’t disappear if they play some of their remaining matches in their own empty stadiums.

Why Refugees Will Struggle to Combat the Coronavirus Instead of allowing the pandemic to exacerbate the harmful impacts of a broken refugee system, this could be an opportunity to remake it. by Shelly Culbertson and Gary Edson

At a time when the pandemic is forcing people to stay at home and practice social-distancing, that is not possible for one of the most vulnerable populations—the world’s seventy-one million refugees, internally displaced persons, and asylum seekers. Having escaped conflict and persecution, they now risk illness and death from the coronavirus. That risk is heightened by a policy regime that focuses largely on refugees in camps, not the almost two-thirds that live in urban areas. But the crisis could provide an opportunity to reform a broken system for the benefit of refugees and host countries alike.  

The word refugee has become synonymous with images of Syrians, Afghanis, Sudanese, Central Americans, and other groups huddled in makeshift camps that have become way stations between the homes they left behind and the safe havens they hope one day to find. Supported by the UN system and international nongovernmental organizations, these camps pose a heightened risk for the coronavirus, with a density of living conditions and lack of water and sanitation that makes social distancing and adequate hygiene impossible.

But the 61 percent of refugees who live in urban areas are also at risk, precisely because their situation is so fundamentally different from those in the camps. While these refugees receive some limited assistance from UN agencies and other multilaterals, they largely rely on work to pay their rent, buy food, and support their families. Indeed, a RAND survey of Syrian refugees in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon found that 65 to 85 percent relied on income from work as their main source of support. Refugees often work on the lowest rungs of the employment ladder, informally, below minimum wage, and without access to a social safety net if they lose their jobs.  

Social-distancing measures during the coronavirus pandemic mean that many of these refugees can no longer work. This has put them in a dire situation because of food insecurity and the need to pay for rent and other expenses. Worse, when they cannot work, they resort to negative coping mechanisms, including reducing the quantity or quality of food, forgoing healthcare, selling personal goods, relying on child labor for additional family income, or having daughters enter into early marriage. 

Refugees in urban areas also depend on local public and private healthcare providers, to whom they often have limited access. For example, the over one million Syrian refugees in Lebanon’s urban areas often cannot afford the fees to access Lebanon’s mainly private health-care system. The majority of the 1.6 million Venezuelans in Colombia lack regular immigration status and therefore have access only to emergency medical care. If refugees in urban areas do not have access to testing, treatment, and, ultimately, a vaccine during the coronavirus pandemic, then they could become vectors for transmission, posing risks to themselves and their host nations.

What is needed is a new framework for helping refugees and host countries—both during and after this crisis—that reflects the different circumstances of refugees in camps and urban areas.  In light of the epidemiological, economic, and humanitarian realities, this framework could be based on the fundamental principle that all people within a country’s borders facing the same health crisis should be treated the same, regardless of where they live or their citizenship status. This framework could also reflect the new 2018 Global Compact on Refugees, which urges that host countries should be supported in their efforts to help the refugees within their borders.

Because many refugees, particularly those in camps, are dependent on support from UN agencies, donor governments could help by responding to appeals by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees for an additional $255 million to improve the coronavirus preparedness and response for refugees. 

But given that host countries are the main source of both employment and health care for the majority of refugees, bilateral and multilateral donors could also help by providing additional financial and technical assistance directly to host governments. Such assistance, however, might best be conditioned on host countries providing refugees with access to the coronavirus testing, treatment, and healthcare on a par with their own citizens. This would be in the host countries’ self-interest, since denying access to quality healthcare for one group could threaten everyone.

Bilateral and multilateral donors could also provide additional funding to the World Food Program for food assistance to refugees who are unable to work. Since refugees contribute to national economies through both their labor and consumption, improved access to a social safety net—and to work once social distancing is relaxed—would be in host countries’ best interests as well.

Finally, to ensure that refugees have access to a vaccine once it becomes available, GAVI, the global Vaccine Alliance, could ensure that eligible countries, the world’s poorest, include refugees in their requests. GAVI could also consider using its policy flexibility to provide assistance to middle-income host countries, like Lebanon and Colombia if they include refugees in national pandemic plans. 

These reforms could be crucial—not only to address this crisis, but also the next one. Conflict and persecution have led to an ever-growing number of displaced people. The impact of climate change, drought, famine, and economic dislocation will only add to their ranks.  

Instead of a post-pandemic world characterized by swelling camps, refugees could benefit from equitable access to work, health care and a social safety net. This could not only make their lives safer and better but could also benefit the host countries. In short, instead of allowing the current crisis to exacerbate the harmful impacts of a broken system, this could be an opportunity to remake it.

What Are the Pros and Cons of Conducting Mass Testing for Coronavirus? We tend to take for granted that the results of medical tests are accurate – but no test is perfect and all carry a risk of harm of some kind. by Jennifer MacLachlan and Benjamin Cowle

Many jurisdictions around the world are now testing people without symptoms as part of efforts to manage COVID-19. In Victoria, asymptomatic health-care workers have been part of the recent “testing blitz”.

We tend to take for granted that the results of medical tests are accurate – but no test is perfect and all carry a risk of harm of some kind. Although there has been a drive to increase testing, we must recognise this is also true for coronavirus.

All tests have limitations

Among the shortfalls of diagnostic testing is the possibility of false negatives (failing to detect a condition when it’s present) and false positives (detecting a condition when it’s absent).

It’s easy to see why false negatives can be a problem – we lose the benefits of early intervention.

But false positives can also cause harm, including unnecessary treatment. This is why positive screening tests are often followed up with a second, different test to confirm a diagnosis.

Examples include further imaging and possibly biopsy following a positive mammogram for breast cancer, or colonoscopy following positive screening for colon cancer.

Why do we get false positives?

False positives can occur for many reasons, including normal human and system errors (for example mislabelling, data entry errors or sample mishandling).

Sometimes false positive test results could be due to a cross-reaction with something else in the sample, such as a different virus.

For COVID-19, the only routinely available option to confirm a positive result is to retest using the same method. This can address the false positives generated through sample contamination or human error.

Even so, some authorities recommend isolation for any person who returns a positive test, regardless of subsequent results.

Testing more widely could mean more false positives

The proportion of false positives among all positive results depends not just on the characteristics of the test, but on how common the condition being tested for is among those being tested.

This is because even a highly specific test – one that generates hardly any false positives – may still generate more false positive results than there are actual cases of the condition in those being tested (true positives).

Let’s work through an example.

Say we have a very good test which is 99.9% specific – that is, only one in 1,000 tests give a false positive. And imagine we’re testing 20,000 people for condition X. Condition X has a very low prevalence – we estimate it affects 0.01%, or one in 10,000 people in the population.

At this level we could expect two people in our sample to have condition X, so we might get two true positive results. But we would also expect around 20 false positive results, given the error rate of our test.

So the proportion of people testing positive who actually have condition X would be only two out of 22, or 9.1%.

This is called the positive predictive value of a test. The lower the prevalence of a condition in the population, the lower the positive predictive value.

What about COVID-19?

In Australia, control measures have been very successful in reducing the number of people currently infected with COVID-19. We estimate the likelihood of a positive test to be very low right now (although of course this may change as restrictions ease).

The current reported number of active COVID-19 cases in Australia is about 600. And even if we’ve only diagnosed one in every ten people currently infected, this still represents less than 0.03% of the population.

While we’re still establishing the specificity of tests for SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus that causes COVID-19), early evidence suggests an estimate of 99% or greater is reasonable.

However, following the same calculations as in the example above, at a prevalence of 0.03%, even a test with 99.9% specificity would mean only 30% of people who test positive actually have the condition. This means more than two-thirds of positive results would actually be false positives if we were testing asymptomatic people with no increased risk.

This is why testing criteria are often applied. If testing is offered only to those with symptoms consistent with COVID-19, the condition is almost certainly more common in those being tested than in the general (asymptomatic) population, and therefore the rate of true positives is going to be higher.

But if we start testing more broadly, the likelihood of false positives becomes a greater concern.

Why are false positives a problem?

Clearly we need tests to be as sensitive as possible – it’s easy to see why a false negative COVID-19 result could be a serious issue. But it’s important to recognise a false positive result can also cause significant problems for an individual and the community.

Consider, for example, the impact of asymptomatic health worker screening if a false positive test result leads to isolation of the person falsely diagnosed, and quarantining of their clinical co-workers identified (incorrectly) as close contacts of a case of COVID-19.

Further, a person who has had a false positive result may feel they are not at risk of future infection as they believe they are immune, leading to potential consequences for the individual and their contacts.

Even from an epidemiologicial perspective, a high proportion of false positives could distort our understanding of the spread of COVID-19 in the community.

Testing for COVID-19 in Australia is highly regulated and uses the best possible tests and highly qualified staff.

But asymptomatic screening when the prevalence of a condition is as low as that of COVID-19 in Australia currently must carefully weigh the benefits of such testing against the potential harms.

How the Coronavirus Is Harming Children's Vaccination Rates against Other Diseases This isn't good. by Jeffrey A. Singer

Key point:Lower vaccination rates means more older (and deadly) diseases.

As I recently wrote here, and spoke about here, bans on elective surgery invoked by governors across the country in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have caused many people to suffer and even possibly face fatal consequences due to delays in necessary medical care. But there are other reasons why the public health emergency has the potential to generate secondary public health crises.

In some cases people are avoiding doctors’ offices and emergency rooms because they worry about handling the expense at a time they have seen their income, and perhaps their savings, vanish during the current economic shutdown. In other cases, people–particularly those with vulnerabilities–avoid medical care out of fear they might get exposed to the virus in the process.

Fear among vulnerable patients that they may contract and succumb to a COVID-19 infection is completely understandable. It is less understandable, however, when this fear makes parents forgo taking their children to the doctor’s office for routine vaccinations against diseases which are far more deadly and contagious, as the Wall Street Journal reported May 8. The timing of certain immunizations in children can be crucial. Forgoing or even just postponing them can have serious consequences.

Despite the fact that family practice and pediatrics offices have employed social distancing strategies to minimize the risk of COVID exposure to parents and their children if they come in for their scheduled vaccinations, the Journal reported:

The immunization rate for all recommended childhood vaccines declined about 40% in the U.S. from late February through mid‐​April, according to Physician’s Computer Co., a provider of electronic health‐​record systems. The data are based on vaccines administered by more than 1,000 pediatricians in 40 states who use PCC’s record system.

Concerns about a drop in the vaccination rate in association with the pandemic were also published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

This is particularly unfortunate considering that children appear relatively spared by the COVID pandemic. According to the CDC, as of May 3 less than two percent of confirmed COVID-19 cases were among patients under age 18. The cases are almost always mild. The CDC report states, “In the U.S., as of April 2, 2020, there have been three deaths among children with laboratory‐​confirmed SARS‐​CoV‐​2 infection that have been reported to CDC, but the contribution of SARS‐​CoV‐​2 infection to the cause of death in these cases is unclear.” The fatality rate among adults under age 50 is likewise extremely low.

Meanwhile, diseases like measles and polio are much more deadly and contagious. Measles can lead to pneumonia, along with brain swelling and secondary permanent neurologic sequelae, such as vision and hearing loss and cognitive impairment. Measles can also be fatal. Complications of polio include paralysis. Parents must consider risks such as these when they fail to get their children vaccinated.

The World Health Organization reported 140,000 deaths from measles occurred globally in 2018, most under the age of five. Even polio virus, thought to be largely eradicated, is showing traces of a comeback, with worldwide reported cases increasing from 28 in 2018 to 163 in 2019.

It’s not only measles that poses a threat. Rotavirus, which can cause severe gastrointestinal illness in children is also a part of the standard vaccination package, as is immunization against Bordetella pertussis, the cause of “whooping cough.” Some vaccinations may protect against problems that can develop down the road. An example is the immunization for human papilloma virus (HPV), which can be a cause of cervical, anal, penile, and throat cancers in adults.

The Wall Street Journal article quoted one pediatrician as saying, “The numbers will tell you it’s guaranteed that some American kid today is going to die in 10 to 20 years of HPV as a result of Covid.”

It would be a great tragedy to see new pandemics, from pathogens previously believed to have been defeated, arise from the ashes of the current pandemic.

Public health experts should inform political leaders as well as the public about the dangers of COVID-19 and the best ways to avoid them. But policymakers and the public should also be told about trade‐​offs, as well as the relative risks faced by different demographic groups. Policies and personal decisions should be based on reason, not fear.

How Coronavirus Complicates the Way Americans Mourn the Dead The virus is making many people think about their own mortality in ways they have never done before. by Shad Thielman

At some point in late April, COVID-19 claimed the life of its 58,221st victim in the United States. We do not know the victim’s name or the exact time of death, but the death was significant: It meant that the coronavirus had claimed more American lives than the entire Vietnam War. 

That conflict, which lasted from 1955 to 1975, resulted in the deaths of 58,220 Americans. COVID-19 surpassed that number in less than four months.

Much like the nightly death counts that took place during the Vietnam era, the grim figures of the current crisis can obscure the fact that those who have perished were human beings, mourned by those they leave behind.

As a veteran and historian whose research examines burial rituals, I know that the way Americans memorialize the dead is steeped in traditions that are both social and cultural. COVID-19 is complicating these longstanding traditions.

The virus is also making many people think about their own mortality in ways they have never done before. As Princeton scholar Eddie S. Glaude Jr. recently wrote in the Washington Post, with COVID-19 Americans can no longer “banish death to the far reaches of our communities.” Instead, “Death is at our doorstep.”

A ledger for lives

In the war of attrition in Vietnam, the U.S. servicemen and women who lost their lives often became enumerated alongside their peers – relegated to a single numerical point of reference among the tens of thousands who died.

Then as now, newspapers and televised coverage included daily casualty reports as the government released the official numbers from Vietnam. These reports became a standard part of newscasts and developed into the central focus of efforts to combat the war.

The daily summaries helped normalize Vietnam deaths in the minds of Americans. The names of the American war dead were listed in numerical order by the date and time of death. Victory was assessed by the number of casualties inflicted upon the enemy. The daily ledger of all combatants who died on both sides of the conflict was used to suggest that America was winning the war.

As a consequence, quantitative data replaced the faces and names of the lost, dehumanized the war dead and influenced an obsession with raw data over traditional means of assessing progress, such as gaining or losing territory.

And much like today, the numbers became politicized as Americans’ trust for their leaders began to wane. Many, both then and now, sought alternative measures to account for the dead.

Media portrayals of the Vietnam conflict furthered this dehumanization by depicting the motionless bodies of American dead. Rarely were the names of the those killed in action included alongside these images.

Such media accounts helped to guide how the public processed death during Vietnam.

Death during crisis

The war against COVID-19 has continued these practices, immersing Americans in daily death totals against an enemy not fully understood. Daily counts of the dead, tests conducted and their results, compiled against the backdrop of overall percentages, is seen to determine success against the coronavirus.

Then as now, images of lifeless bodies with no names attached are shown – only now they’re being carted into refrigerated trucks.

In addition to the parallels in the way the dead are converted into quantitative data, Vietnam and the pandemic also share similarities in how the deceased are being mourned.

Vietnam veteran Bill Hunt wrote in 1990 that “In the end, all wars are about dying. When the dying is about honor, it is somehow OK.” But during the Vietnam War, public sensitivity to the number of dead and apathy toward the conflict actually decreased support for what the American public viewed as “sunk costs” and the loss of 58,220 lives.

Due in large part to this lack of understanding among Americans about what their loved ones were dying for, the casualties of the Vietnam War placed emotional strain on those grieving a lost service member. Deaths from the conflict were often mourned privately and without public celebration.

The same has been true of COVID-19 victims. Due to fear of contagion, families are unable to be present at hospitals during the final days and minutes of their loved one’s lives. An overburdened funeral industry and shelter-in-place orders also mean family and friends cannot bury or memorialize their loved ones in traditional ways such as by holding a wake or funeral.

In both the battle against COVID-19 and the Vietnam War, this isolation makes mourning, burial, memorialization and saying goodbye both problematic and private. As a result, reconciling the loss of their loved one is much more arduous and making it harder for those left behind to find closure and process their deaths.

Public remembrance

Eventually, the names of the service members who died in Vietnam adorned the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., acknowledging publicly for the first time the sacrifices of those who died. Having a permanent place of remembrance helped to ease the pain of those untimely deaths.

We do not know if those who perish during the current pandemic will be memorialized in a similar fashion. And sadly, not everyone will receive an obituary in which details of their lives can be read.

It may be that we have to find new ways to reconcile the deaths of those who lost their lives in the fight against COVID-19.

But to move on, we must acknowledge the men and women who are dying, give them names and faces and publicly honor them – not only for the dead but for the living who continue to mourn.

“Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan”—Can Modi Find India a Place in the Sun? India's future could be even brighter if it makes the right call. by Salvatore Babones

As the coronavirus pandemic starts to wind down, the world’s major economies are struggling to get back to business. The problem seems to be that no one except Elon Musk seems to know how to reopen. No one, that is, except Narendra Modi. While many of the world’s leaders are floundering over coronavirus recovery plans, India’s maverick prime minister Narendra Modi has seized the initiative.

Like most things Modi, his plan to turn the epidemic into an opportunity for remaking India’s economy is long on vision and short on details. “Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan” doesn’t exactly fall off the English-speaker’s tongue, but it is Hindi for “Self-Reliant India Campaign.” Exactly what self-reliance means, Modi isn’t saying. But one thing we know for certain: it’s not a return to the Congress-era “License Raj.”

From independence through the big bang reforms of 1991, India experienced a form of “communism lite.” The Congress Party was firmly entrenched in power, and nearly all big business was organized by (if not necessarily owned by) the state. That all came to an end in 1991 under Narasimha Rao and (more importantly) his reforming finance minister Manmohan Singh. Spurred on by a balance of payments emergency, the erstwhile socialist Singh devalued the currency, cut import tariffs, and deregulated industry. The economy boomed, and Singh would later go on to become a popular two-term prime minister.

Modi plans to spend 20 lakh crore rupees on India’s coronavirus response, and he wants to make it count. For the uninitiated, a lakh is 100,000 and a crore is 10,000,000, so 20 lack crore comes to 20 trillion rupees, or nearly $300 billion. That’s a lot of money in India, where GDP came in at roughly $3 trillion in 2019. At 10% of GDP, Modi can only raise that kind of money with the support of India’s central bank, the Mumbai-based Reserve Bank of India.

But self-reliance is easier said than done. Modi promises to do it with a focus on “land, labour, liquidity and laws” so as to benefit “labourers, farmers, honest tax payers, MSMEs (micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises), and cottage industry.” That sounds like an old-fashioned Gandhian plea for people to wear home-spun cotton. It certainly won’t remake India’s economy for the twenty-first century. India should certainly put more money in the hands of ordinary consumers (which in India means people earning less than $500 a month), but it should be encouraging them to get online, not buy more jewelry.

It may sound crazy, but poverty-stricken India accounts for nearly 30% of global jewelry consumption. Except that that’s not really consumption: it’s investment. Unfortunately, it’s investment in a completely non-productive asset. If India wants become more self-reliant for business investment, the fastest way to do it would be to convince people to shift their portfolios out of jewelry and into shares. That poses a difficult cultural challenge, but it’s an economic no-brainer. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government recently increased gold tariffs from 10% to 12.5%. That’s a good start, but it won’t be enough to change deeply-ingrained habits.

At nearly 25%, India’s imports expressed as a percentage of GDP are much larger than America’s 15%. The biggest chunks of India’s imports bill go to oil (17.9%), gold (9.3%), and diamonds (4.9%). Mobile phones, much touted as a potential import substitution growth industry for India, account for only 2.7%, less even than coal (4.7%). These data are from 2017 (the latest available), but the current picture probably looks pretty similar.

If Modi really wants to promote economic self-reliance, the most important thing he can do is improve the country’s energy security. Oil may be cheap right now, but it won’t stay cheap forever. Oil and coal imports have to be brought down, and for India, that means massive investments in solar and hydroelectric power. India lacks major conventional hydrocarbon reserves, and shale gas exploration has turned up few opportunities for commercially-viable fracking. Even if renewables weren’t in fashion, they are the right approach for India.

Hydro development requires long-term government support, will take years to come online, and has been tied up in the usual red tape. As the success of large-scale hydroelectric exploitation in the United States, Scandinavia, and more recently China has demonstrated, there is no more cost-effective source of reliable baseline power. The environmental challenges are tricky, but surmountable. As a flood-prone country on the slopes of the highest mountain range in the world, India would be crazy not to take advantage of its hydro potential. But Modi and his BJP have been in power since 2014 and have made little progress.

That leaves solar. A self-reliant India must be a solar India. Currently, India imports most of its solar panels from China, but the coronavirus crisis has the potential to change that. The big barrier in India is, as always, excessive (even if often under-enforced) regulation. Another is a lack of scale. The government could quickly change all that with a few big tenders for domestically-manufactured solar panels to jump-start the industry. Even if it took foreign firms to set up shop in the country to get things started, India would benefit in the long run.

A self-reliant India needs less investment in gold and more investment in sunshine. India has the investment potential and the market potential. In Narendra Modi, it has a reforming prime minster to match Manmohan Singh. If Modi wants “Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan” to be anything but a slogan, he has to reach for the sun. If sunshine is the best disinfectant, it might just be what Modi needs to get India out of its coronavirus slump.

The Early Casualties of the TAIPEI Act in the Post-Coronavirus World Political tensions across the Taiwan Strait have been reinforced during the coronavirus pandemic. The last thing that Taiwan should want to do is to provoke Beijing with direct and indirect actions to push for independence. by Patrick Mendis

mid coronavirus, Taiwan has become an epicenter of international geopolitics between China and the United States at the World Health Organization (WHO). The sovereign democracy has a complicated history with the two economic powers and has now arrived at a crossroads of political and economic challenges—with a perceived military option as a last resort. 

The longstanding Chinese conviction is that Beijing will ultimately unify the island through “force” if need be, as Chinese president Xi Jinping claimed. Meanwhile the United States’ new TAIPEI Act (Taiwan Allies International Protection and Enhancement Initiative) has all but removed the ambiguity of the “one China policy” that helped maintain the status quo since Washington recognized Beijing in 1979.

With two pro-nationalist administrations in Taipei and Washington, unprecedented political and military advances at the level of bilateral relations raise ambivalent sentiments. The re-elected President Tsai Ing-wen will soon have to deal with three political and economic challenges after her second inauguration on May 20. She will eventually be forced to address the response to the cross-Strait issues from China’s annual “two sessions” congress rescheduled for May 21–22 in Beijing.

Premature Death to the American Legislation

Anticipating a range of direct Chinese responses, the Tsai administration must first prepare strategic solutions to the likely situation of Beijing halting Taiwanese imports, which comprised over 40 percent of Taiwan’s total trade in 2019. More importantly, trade relations with China accounts for $50 billion—a critical source of Taiwan’s annual trade surplus. This could easily come in the form of forcing Taipei to label “the originality of products from ‘Taiwan, China.’” This would be an old but a brilliant Beijing strategy: forcing Taiwan to align more with the “one China policy” and circumventing the TAIPEI Act. This strategy would present the United States with an early casualty of economic warfare while foreshadowing to the Trump White House the yet-to-come implications of its own “trade war” with China. 

The political calculations in President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and the White House’s prevailing discussion of strategy to impose tariffs on the bilateral trade deal with China would negatively impact Taiwan’s prospects for better cross-strait relations. The Trump White House has neither viable economic endowment nor credible diplomatic power, lacking support and trust from even its European and Asian allies and friends. Obviously then, the TAIPEI Act will hardly be an effective strategy to convince or force other countries to side with the United States in a political standoff with China. There are hardly any exports that the United States needs from Taiwan that could not otherwise be redirected from China. Taiwan’s geographic proximity, bilateral investment relations, inherent connectivity of global value chains, historical linkages, and shared language are increasingly in China’s favor.

Trade that Binds Nations

Second, the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) signed between China and Taiwan in 2010 is another upcoming challenge for the Tsai administration if China decides to withdraw it or curtail the mutual economic benefits and tariff advantages. About 5–7 percent of Taiwan’s overall trade—mainly petrochemical, textile, electronic components, and agricultural products——entitled to zero-tariff privileges on the “early harvest list” would be seriously affected.

The most critical part of ECFA may not only be on economic give-and-take but more on the prospects for political uncertainty. Thus far, there is no clear sign as to what extent the Tsai administration will proceed. Under the prevailing negative political atmosphere in the cross-Strait relations, should ECFA be discouraged, it will imply a direct warning to Taipei.    

Nonmilitary Pressure on Taiwan

Third, it is unlikely that China would repeat a military action to take possession of Taiwan’s island-territories as it did in the past, involving the U.S. evacuation effort. Instead, China will most likely use nonmilitary tools for political ends while putting economic pressure on the Tsai administration. For example, Beijing could further shrink Taiwan’s international space through sharp-power economic diplomacy and its growing political influence on other countries, which would dim Taipei’s hope for the resumption of cross-Strait relations.

Sustained maintenance of China’s Liaoning Aircraft Carrier, reconnaissance aircraft data missions, and submarine patrols in the Taiwan Strait are also part of this auxiliary pressure strategy. The U.S. counter-military strategy in the cross-Strait and the South China Sea might continue but Beijing’s economic strategy seems to be more effective as shown in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere. 

Rhetoric Is Not Strategy

The politics of rhetoric is an asset in a political campaign as Trump is focusing on his own re-election campaign with a strategy of China-bashing against his opponent. If history is a guide in dealing with the United States and its evolved relations with China on the basis of economic and trade interests, then the Tsai administration needs to rethink its antagonizing approach to its increasingly powerful neighbor whose relations go beyond politics of noise.  

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, spreading since January 2020, Taipei has followed in Washington’s footsteps of vocal criticism of China’s cover-up of the coronavirus from the onset and openly slashed WHO. The emerging domestic nationalism and populism are supercharging the course of public opinion and netizen sentiments. In the short run, it may look good as a positive performance of the ruling administrations in Taipei and Washington. Strategically, however, it may backfire in the post-coronavirus contest of Sino-American geostrategic rivalry and Washington’s decoupling rhetoric and blame-game tactics for myopic political ends. In her second term, Tsai needs to quickly find a way to engage with China rather than speculate over the residual advantage of Sino-American rivalry.

Political tensions across the Taiwan Strait have been reinforced during the coronavirus pandemic. The last thing that Taiwan should want to do is to provoke Beijing with direct and indirect actions to push for independence. Garnered by the Trump administration’s anti-China political campaign and Taiwan’s domestic anti-China populism, the ruling Democratic Progressive Party of Taiwan prepares to push the envelope through a legislative proposal by denying “national unification” to be an alternative future between mainland China and Taiwan. A new turbulence may soon shake regional stability and peace. It would become an unprecedented challenge for Tsai when she begins her second term.