The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a multi-dimensional crisis that encompasses both the realm of public health and political economy. The divergences in the public health and economic policy responses among countries have resulted in an unleashing of a propaganda war. This paper is concerned with hegemonic narratives advocated by the mainstream media about China's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the facts thereof. After examining in broad outline the temporal trajectory of the public health response in China and its underlying factors, the paper goes on to critically examine some contentious issues concerning the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic in China that have been highlighted in the hegemonic narrative in the propaganda war over the COVID-19 pandemic. It is submitted that the divergence in the public health response of different countries is intimately related to the varied state of the neoliberal project therein. The paper concludes with a brief engagement with the political economy of the hegemonic narrative in the propaganda war.

We use a simple general model of interactive dynamics between the COVID-19 pandemic and the economy to examine the impact of various nonpharmaceutical interventions in the form of restrictions on socio-economic activities like lockdowns, travel restrictions, etc. We mathematically demonstrate that these restrictions might be useful in preventing repeated waves of infection recurrence in the pandemic. These results are general and not dependent on choice of specific functional forms or parameter configurations. We set out briefly the implications of these results for public health interventions.

Early formal models in Post-Keynesian macroeconomics included an investment function (Rowthorn, 1981) or conflict inflation (Rowthorn, 1977), but the dynamics of these two processes were not analyzed together in a single model. More recently, a class of models emerged which brings both these lines of literature together by proposing a model of conflict inflation with Kaleckian investment function (see, for instance e.g., Cassetti, 2002Cassetti, , 2003. However, as Skott and Zipperer (2012) points out, these models suffer from an important limitation: the bargaining power of workers is dependent either on the degree of capacity utilization or on the rate of growth of employment, but not on the the rate of employment. In other words, many of these models do not explicitly account for the process through which the supply of labor adjusts to its demand, either through migration or through changes in labor productivity. The actual process through which this adjustment takes place, and the impact of this on

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The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has led to an aggravation of the agrarian crisis in India. The rural proletariat, poor peasants, and a section of middle peasants in India have been adversely affected. The paper advances a composite policy initiative to deal with this aggravation of the agrarian crisis involving an expansion of the existing rural employment guarantee schemes, various input subsidies to farmers, universal provision of safety gear for rural producers, and an expanded public procurement of food grains. It concludes with the political prognosis of the proposed composite policy initiative.